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Connective recovery in social networks after the death of a friend

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, Article number: 0092 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Most individuals have few close friends, leading to potential isolation after a friend’s death. Do social networks heal to fill the space left by the loss? We conduct such a study of self-healing and resilience in social networks. We compared de-identified, aggregate counts of monthly interactions in approximately 15,000 Facebook networks in which someone had died with similar friendship networks of living Facebook users. As expected, a substantial amount of social interaction was lost with the death of a friend. However, friends of the decedent immediately increased interactions with each other and maintained these added interactions for years after the loss. Through this, the social networks recovered approximately the same number of active connections that had been lost. Interactions between close friends of the decedent peaked immediately after the death and then reached stable levels after a year. Interactions between close friends of the decedent and acquaintances of the decedent stabilized sooner, within a few months. Networks of young adults, ages 18 to 24, were more likely to recover than all other age groups, but unexpected deaths resulted in larger increases in social interactions that did not differ by friends’ ages. Suicides were associated with reduced social-network recovery.

Most individuals have few close friends1–3, and close friends are key sources of support4. After the death of a friend, close-friend networks could dissolve or experience long-term impairment. Although theoretical models suggest that networks are often globally robust to random losses5,6, we have limited empirical foundation for models of resilience in human networks. There are currently no large-scale studies that evaluate recovery and resilience after deaths in friend groups.

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Figure 1: Connective recovery.
Figure 2: Short- and long-term changes in interaction after the death of a friend.
Figure 3: Variation in connective recovery by subject age, close-friend age, interaction type and cause of mortality.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Fowler, N. Christakis, C. Marlow, L. Adamic, D. Ferrante, A. Bejar, P. Fleming, W. Nevius and M. Jackman for their support on this project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Social Sciences, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive 0521, La Jolla, 92093-0521, California, USA

    William R. Hobbs

  2. Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, 177 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts

    William R. Hobbs

  3. 02115, USA

    William R. Hobbs

  4. Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    William R. Hobbs

  5. Facebook, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA

    Moira K. Burke

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Contributions

W.R.H. and M.K.B. designed the research; W.R.H. analysed the data; W.R.H. and M.K.B. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to William R. Hobbs.

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Competing interests

W.H. was a Facebook research intern in 2013. M.B. is a Facebook employee. W.H. prepared the research protocol prior to his internship; Facebook then provided data access to W.H. to conduct the study as an intern. Facebook did not place any restrictions on the design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript, beyond the requirement that this work was to be done in compliance with its data policy and that the prepared manuscript was subject to internal research review to not release proprietary information. During the study protocol’s review by the California Department of Public Health, Facebook submitted a letter stating that it would not attempt to influence the scientific interpretation of the results and would not prohibit the publication of the results owing to their scientific content.

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Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Figures 1–8, Supplementary Tables 1–12, Supplementary References. (PDF 430 kb)

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Hobbs, W., Burke, M. Connective recovery in social networks after the death of a friend. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0092 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0092

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