Sociology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The COVID-19 pandemic affected mortality, fertility, and migration. Using the cohort component projection method, the authors find that if the pandemic had not occurred, the expected population of the U.S. would have been 2.1 million more people in 2025 and 1.7 million more people in 2060.

    • Andrea M. Tilstra
    • , Antonino Polizzi
    •  & Evelina T. Akimova

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was a decline in healthcare utilisation for other conditions. Here, the authors quantify this decline in the Netherlands and show that impacts were greater for individuals with lower household income, females, older people, and those with a migrant background.

    • Arun Frey
    • , Andrea M. Tilstra
    •  & Mark D. Verhagen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Open science practices are becoming more common in the social sciences, but there is limited data on their popularity and prevalence. Here, using survey data, the authors provide evidence that levels of adoption are relatively high and underestimated by many in the field.

    • Joel Ferguson
    • , Rebecca Littman
    •  & John-Henry Pezzuto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Personal communication networks through mobile phones and online platforms can be characterized by patterns of tie strengths. The authors propose a model to explain driving mechanisms of emerging tie strength heterogeneity in social networks, observing similarity of patterns across various datasets.

    • Gerardo Iñiguez
    • , Sara Heydari
    •  & Jari Saramäki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about the dynamics of human cooperation in groups with changing compositions. Using data from a large-scale and long-term online public goods game, this study shows how group changes are associated with temporarily lower cooperation.

    • Kasper Otten
    • , Ulrich J. Frey
    •  & Naomi Ellemers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Socioeconomic segregation is one of the main factors behind large-scale inequalities in urban areas and its characterisation remains challenging. The authors propose a family of non-parametric measures to quantify spatial heterogeneity through diffusion, and show how this relates to segregation and deprivation

    • Sandro Sousa
    •  & Vincenzo Nicosia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dynamical development process of various social network platforms shows emergence and transformation of user communities. The authors model social network formation processes considering the meritocratic perspective, where users make their decisions based on the user-generated content.

    • Nicolò Pagan
    • , Wenjun Mei
    •  & Florian Dörfler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding of complex contagions is crucial for explaining diffusion processes in networks. Guilbeault and Centola introduce topological mechanisms and measures to elucidate spreading dynamics and identify the most influential nodes in social, epidemic and economic networks.

    • Douglas Guilbeault
    •  & Damon Centola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Category systems exhibit striking agreement across many cultures, yet paradoxically individuals exhibit large variation in the categorization of novel stimuli. Here the authors show that critical mass dynamics explain the convergence of independent populations on shared category systems.

    • Douglas Guilbeault
    • , Andrea Baronchelli
    •  & Damon Centola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooperation among humans is threatened by the free-rider problem. Here the authors identify another challenge to human cooperation: self-reliance, the ability to solve shared problems individually. The experiment reveals that self-reliance crowds out cooperation and increases wealth inequality.

    • Jörg Gross
    • , Sonja Veistola
    •  & Eric Van Dijk

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Based on a strategic network formation model, the authors develop game-theoretical and statistical methods to infer individuals’ incentives in complex social networks, and validate their findings in real-world, historical data sets.

    • Nicolò Pagan
    •  & Florian Dörfler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using agent-based models of a problem-solving task in a network, the authors show that clustering people of similar knowledge maintains solution diversity and increases long run system collective performance. Clustering those with similar abilities, however, lowers solution diversity and performance.

    • Charles J. Gomez
    •  & David M. J. Lazer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How do socially polarized systems change and how does a change in polarization relate to performance? Using instant messaging data and performance records from day traders, the authors find that certain relations are prone to balance and that balance is associated with better trading decisions.

    • Omid Askarisichani
    • , Jacqueline Ng Lane
    •  & Brian Uzzi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In areas with two or more spoken languages, linguistic shift may occur as speakers of one language switch to the other. Here, the authors show that linguistic shift is faster in rural compared to urban regions of Galicia, a bilingual community in Spain, due to the competition of internal complexity and network relevance.

    • Mariamo Mussa Juane
    • , Luis F. Seoane
    •  & Jorge Mira

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social groups form collective memories, but the temporal dynamics of this process are unclear. Here, the authors show that when early conversations involve individuals that bridge across clusters of a social network, the network reaches higher mnemonic convergence compared to when early conversations occur within clusters.

    • Ida Momennejad
    • , Ajua Duker
    •  & Alin Coman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid arrival to hospital after stroke is critical for patients to receive effective treatment. Here, the authors examine how stroke patients’ social network structure relates to stroke arrival time, and show that small and close-knit personal networks predict delayed arrival.

    • Amar Dhand
    • , Douglas Luke
    •  & Jin-Moo Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex networks can be a useful tool to investigate problems in social science. Here the authors use game theory to establish a network model and then use a machine learning approach to characterize the role of nodes within a social network.

    • Yuan Yuan
    • , Ahmad Alabdulkareem
    •  & Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some argue that health-related behaviours, such as obesity, are contagious, but empirical evidence of health contagion remains inconclusive. Here, using a large scale quasi-experiment in a global network of runners, Aral and Nicolaides show that this type of contagion exists in fitness behaviours.

    • Sinan Aral
    •  & Christos Nicolaides

Browse broader subjects

Browse Sociology across other nature.com journals