The Structural Microfoundations theory of the society is a work-in-progress model system backed by growing empirical evidence.
We created this website to be theory's home.
You are my love.
You are my sister.
You are my friend.
A trivial fact of our species’ social life is that the human social network edge type varies. This variation is not only important for each of these relationships, but also for the structure of the social network around us. This website introduces the models for what happens to the social network structure when the bulk of these relationships change. Our societies shift from kinship networks to friendship networks due to falling fertility, urbanisation, and migration. The second part collects an overview of the existing empirical evidence using large datasets, and suggests explicit empirical hypotheses. The final part covers how further phenomena are predicted by this theory, and ideas of how to test these.
With critical comments, collaborative ideas, or to receive updates on new results, please write to the email address: contact at microfoundations dot world.
NB. This is not the sequence of the papers in which they were published, but more the sequence it makes sense to read them now. Please note that the notation is evolving.
Modelling engine:
Fertility to network structure:
Microfoundations logic rewires
homophily in friendship:: Herding Friends in Similarity-Based Architecture of Social Networks
kinship concept: Kinship Is a Network Tracking Social Technology, Not an Evolutionary Phenomenon (preprint)
rise of ideologies: Fertility, Kinship, and Evolution of Mass Ideologies
marriage traditions: Network Ecology of Marriage (preprint)
Papers on the variation of edge types in human social networks:
Communication with family and friends across the life course
World-wide Evidence for Gender Difference in Sociality (preprint)
Social technologies
Human Group Size Puzzle: Why It Is Odd That We Live in Large Societies
Collaboration Conundrum: Synchrony-Cooperation Trade-off (preprint)
Engine room:
With critical comments, collaborative ideas, or to receive updates on new results, please write to the email address: contact at microfoundations dot world.
1. Prologue
Two stories of the human society
2. Brief version
Introduction to the theory. An illustrated table of contents.
3. Location in the knowledge web
Incitements and location in the knowledge web.
4. Recap: origins of cooperation
Essential recap of evolution of cooperation. The answer did not used to be trivial. Some building blocks are introduced.
5. Human has edge type
Human social relationships vary in type: kin, love, friend. This has structural consequences for the social network.
6. Graph structure matters for cooperation
The clustering coefficient is key to cooperation on human social network. This is a core point, the engine of theory.
7. Why we all gossip
Brief natural history of third-party norm monitoring.
8. Social network structure varies
Even when the degree is the same (everyone has the same number of friends), the interconnectedness of the social network graph can have a wide range.
9. How to build a kin network
Human kinship deconstructed into genetic and cultural, and then reconstructed into networks.
10. Fertility drives network structure
The building blocks are put together. Falling fertility empties kin networks, giving way to friendship.
Friendship comes with different network properties than kinship. This is why demographic transition results in differently structured social network.
Our social world changes.
11. Urbanisation etc
We expand the theory to other demographic process. Urbanisation has similar effects on network structure as falling fertility.
Migration, deadly epidemics and war are added to the list.
12. Quasi-kin solutions in ideologies and religions
Clubs, tribes, nations, territory, kin language cues.
13. Triangles in phone data
A clever trick in large phone dataset combined with brilliant sub-national statistics allowed the direct testing of the Microfoundations theory in one country, on big data.
14. Network ecology of marriage
Microfoundations mechanics to when and why humans create in-laws at the same time as choosing long-term romantic partners. A direct empirical test.
15. Network effects in mate choice
Indirect empirical test: a cross-cultural survey/experiment, in 7 languages three continents, suggests that network regulation through tracking in-laws might be a human universal. The main drivers are generation earlier fertility and current urbanisation, in line with the Microfoundations theory.
16. Wedding is a social technology
A wedding operationalises affinal kin bonds. Cultural pattern around the world is in support.
17. Homophily in friendship
Homophily increases the clustering coefficient in low-fertility, urban, migratory populations. In modern societies, we choose friends who are similar to us so that our social network becomes more integrated. The U transition is introduced.
18. Birds of a feather
Friendship similarity data. This needs more work.
19. Kinship is a network trick
Reframing anthropology's kinship concept, predicting its emergence, key traits, and fall.
20. Modern kinship
Examples.
21. Small World effect
Demographic transition triggers the Small World Effect. Postal service, phone and email systems, and social networking sites merely make us see it rather than generate it.
22. Individualism is a coping strategy
The social network groups around us shape-shift from onion to overlapping clubs. Our group membership signalling becomes too taxing, so we better just be individuals: ‘Y'am who y'am’.
23. Trust, distrust, crime
Demographic transition decreases cooperative stance, and increases norm violations. Urbanisation, falling fertility, migration, wars, and epidemics all trigger social trust crises.
24. Law
Law is the society's adaptation to the increased increase norm violations due to urbanisation, falling fertility, etc. The altered payoff matrices remove the strategic element of collective action: strategic cooperation turns into mutualism.
25. Modern economy is an infinitely-scalable social machine
The network foundations to the forager, farmer, early urban, and modern urban economies. Today we organise ourselves into giant economic machines, that can last forever, and be of any size.
26. Optimal political systems
The ideal political system changes as our societies go through the U transition curve. Because of this, almost every society is out of sync with the optimal, is locked into a suboptimal constitutional system.
27. Fundamentalism
Value fundamentalism, ideological radicalisation, happens mid-transition through the U curve, and goes away by the end of the transition.
28. Fake news
Fake news is the side-effect of individuals' network management strategy, typical at the end of the U-transition.
29. Inequality accelerator
The U transition makes the traditional inequality regulating institutions obsolete, and -- at the same time -- increases the network rewiring speed. Both result in increased social inequality.
30. Psychological challenges
A new framing for teenage depression, urban and old age loneliness. Network mechanics explain the link between community living and longevity.
31. Reputation industry
Cooperative reputation becomes a digitised social technology. Rating systems in airbnb, uber, etc, create scalable reputation, increases cooperativeness, and conjures up imaginary communities. Government-tracked social scoring emerges.
32. Engineered longevity
Some of us living longer will amplify the loneliness challenge. A space to invent new institutions.
33. How to wire 8bn people
Families have shrunk, we are all friends now. For the first time in human history, in fact, in the history of Life, it is possible for one species to design its own planetary social network. The slight hitch is that while the need for collective action is imminent, the human ape's social cognition capacity is limited to small groups, and this particular ape deeply dislikes steep inequality. Hmmm.
34. Summary
The aim is not to replace social sciences, but to create a layer under them. Microfoundations might allow the connection among social sciences with roots in biology.