The Relative Contributions of Traits and Contexts on Social Network Learning.

Authors

Ameer Ghouse, Raphael Kaplan

Published in

Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science. Volume 9. Pages 1506-1527. Epub Sep 09, 2025.

Abstract

Navigating the social world is guided by remembering which people know each other. Yet, different factors might influence how social relationships are remembered, where people's shared attributes could distort a social network's mnemonic representation. Here, we study whether dyadically shared contexts and personality traits impact how people remember relationships in social networks. Through varying levels of network topological complexity, we find the contexts where people know each other are most memorable and that better contextual retrieval predicts relationship recall. In contrast, shared personality traits affect relationship recall differently depending on social network complexity, where shared negatively valenced traits relate to worse relationship recall in the simple network. Subsequent modeling revealed that as networks become more complex, relationships between more centrally positioned individuals that share negatively valenced traits are better recalled compared to less well-connected individuals. These results suggest contextual memory can serve as a scaffold for remembering relationships in a social network, while affective traits' impact on social network retrievability depends on emotional valence and the individuals involved. More generally, our findings give insight into how the same social network can be represented differently based on one's past experience.

PMID:
41036496
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Oct 2025.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.