Some aspects on human preference in communication and friendship

The objects of our investigation are social networks consisting of individual actants as nodes and their relations as links. Recently, on-line communities have gained immense popularity as indicated by millions of members participating in these platforms. Fortunately, the information given by member activity provides an ideal environment to study structural preferences of social behavior. In particular, we address the questions of how network topology benefits the establishment of new relations between the actants. Among others, we find that actants tend to get connected at a distance of 2. Further analysis indicates that the more common neighbors two actants have, the more likely they will be in relation with each other. We attribute this behavior to some kind of social pressure imposed by the neighborhood biasing the actants preferences.