Interpersonal Perception in Virtual Groups: Examining Homophily, Identification and Individual Attraction Using Social Relations Model in Network

With the penetration of the Internet, virtual groups have become more and more popular. The reliability and accuracy of interpersonal perception in the virtual environment is an intriguing issue. Using the Social relations model (SRM) [1], this paper investigates interpersonal perception in virtual groups from a multilevel perspective. In particular, it examines the following three areas: homophily, identification, and individual attraction, and explores how much of these directional and dyadic relational evaluations can be attributed to the effect of the actor, the partner, and the relationship.

Let’s Be Friends: National Homophily in Multicultural Newcomer Student Networks

Understanding the relational and network dynamics among newcomer networks is important to devising appropriate strategies that will maximize the productivity of the incoming workforce. Nevertheless, there are limited empirical contributions on newcomer networks with few studies examining newcomer networks in international environments. This study focuses on national homophily and examines whether ethnic identity salience, self-efficacy, individualism and ethnocentrism are associated with the occurrence of national homophily in newcomers networks. Using a multicultural student sample drawn from newly formed networks, the study found that ethnic identity salience and academic self-efficacy are associated with national homophily positively and negatively, respectively. Individualism is not found to be related to homophily while, contrary to our hypothesis, ethnocentrism is found to be negatively related to homophily. Through its examination of the effect of attitudinal variables on homophily, this study contributes to the broader literature on homophily and provides implications for managers and researchers.

Heterophilic Graph Neural Network Based on Spatial and Frequency Domain Adaptive Embedding Mechanism

Graph Neural Networks(GNNs)play a significant role in tasks related to homophilic graphs.Traditional GNNs,based on the assumption of homophily,employ low-pass filters for neighboring nodes to achieve information aggregation and embedding.However,in heterophilic graphs,nodes from different categories often establish connections,while nodes of the same category are located further apart in the graph topology.This characteristic poses challenges to traditional GNNs,leading to issues of“distant node modeling deficiency”and“failure of the homophily assumption”.In response,this paper introduces the Spatial-Frequency domain Adaptive Heterophilic Graph Neural Networks(SFA-HGNN),which integrates adaptive embedding mechanisms for both spatial and frequency domains to address the aforementioned issues.Specifically,for the first problem,we propose the“Distant Spatial Embedding Module”,aiming to select and aggregate distant nodes through high-order randomwalk transition probabilities to enhance modeling capabilities.For the second issue,we design the“Proximal Frequency Domain Embedding Module”,constructing adaptive filters to separate high and low-frequency signals of nodes,and introduce frequency-domain guided attention mechanisms to fuse the relevant information,thereby reducing the noise introduced by the failure of the homophily assumption.We deploy the SFA-HGNN on six publicly available heterophilic networks,achieving state-of-the-art results in four of them.Furthermore,we elaborate on the hyperparameter selection mechanism and validate the performance of each module through experimentation,demonstrating a positive correlation between“node structural similarity”,“node attribute vector similarity”,and“node homophily”in heterophilic networks.

“Good Vibrations”: The Social Networks of Optimists and Alter-Optimists

This study empirically tested if the personality trait of optimism and the interpersonal capability to generate optimism in one’s network nodes (i.e., alter-optimism) influences the social relationship patterns. The results provide evidence that optimism trait is independent from the way social networks of personal-issue sharing, advice-seeking, problem-solving, and innovation, are structured. In contrary, the alter-optimism capability does provide a good explanation of one’s social network position. Implications of these findings are discussed at the end.

Building trust networks in the absence of trust relations

User-specified trust relations are often very sparse and dynamic, making them difficult to accurately predict from online social media. In addition, trust relations are usually unavailable for most social media platforms.These issues pose a great challenge for predicting trust relations and further building trust networks. In this study,we investigate whether we can predict trust relations via a sparse learning model, and propose to build a trust network without trust relations using only pervasively available interaction data and homophily effect in an online world. In particular, we analyze the reliability of predicting trust relations by interaction behaviors, and provide a principled way to mathematically incorporate interaction behaviors and homophily effect in a novel framework,b Trust. Results of experiments on real-world datasets from Epinions and Ciao demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments were conducted to understand the importance of interaction behaviors and homophily effect in building trust networks.

Research on Trust Prediction from a Sociological Perspective

Trust, as a major part of human interactions, plays an important role in helping users collect reliable infor-mation and make decisions. However, in reality, user-specified trust relations are often very sparse and follow a power law distribution; hence inferring unknown trust relations attracts increasing attention in recent years. Social theories are frameworks of empirical evidence used to study and interpret social phenomena from a sociological perspective, while social networks reflect the correlations of users in real world; hence, making the principle, rules, ideas and methods of social theories into the analysis of social networks brings new opportunities for trust prediction. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit homophily and social status in trust prediction by modeling social theories. We first give several methods to compute homophily coe？cient and status coe？cient, then provide a principled way to model trust prediction mathe-matically, and propose a novel framework, hsTrust, which incorporates homophily theory and status theory. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments are conducted to understand the importance of homophily theory and status theory in trust prediction.