Emergent Communities in Socio-cognitive Networks

Abstract

We investigate a recent network model which combines social and cognitive features. Each node in the social network holds a (possibly different) cognitive network that represent its beliefs. In this internal cognitive network a node denotes a concept and a link indicates whether the two linked concepts are taken to be of a similar or opposite nature. We show how these networks naturally organise into communities and use this to develop a method that detects communities in social networks. How they organise depends on the social structure and the ratio between the cognitive and social forces driving the propagation of beliefs.