The bridging and bonding structures of place-centric networks: Evidence from a developing country.

Social capital has long been associated with opportunities of access to valuable resources that individuals, groups, communities, and places can extract from the social structure emerging from their interactions. Despite the overall consensus on the structural signature of social capital, there is still controversy over the relative benefits associated with different types of social structure. In this article, we advocate a two-faceted perspective on social capital, regarded as value originating from both closed (rich in third-party relationships) and open (rich in brokerage opportunities) bridging structures. We uncover these structures from place-centric networks and investigate their association with key socio-economic indicators. To this end, we draw on aggregated mobile phone usage data, and construct the place-centric communication and mobility networks in the city of Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire. We begin by defining appropriate network metrics to capture the interplay between bonding and bridging social structures in each of the 10 districts (communes) in Abidjan. We then examine the correlation between these metrics and a number of district-level socio-economic indicators related to economic prosperity, wealth, security and democratic participation. Our findings suggest that both closed and open structures can serve as wellsprings of social capital: while closed bonding structures are associated with higher economic prosperity, open bridging structures are associated with increased democratic participation and security. By uncovering sources of social capital from communication and mobility place-centric networks in a developing country, our work contributes to a better understanding of how these networks could be used to enhance and sustain socio-economic growth and prosperity, and ultimately paves the way towards a broader comparative study of social capital in developed and developing countries.

Investigating the association between social interactions and personality states dynamics.

The recent personality psychology literature has coined the name of personality states to refer to states having the same behavioural, affective and cognitive content (described by adjectives) as the corresponding trait, but for a shorter duration. The variability in personality states may be the reaction to specific characteristics of situations. The aim of our study is to investigate whether specific situational factors, that is, different configurations of face-to-face interactions, are predictors of variability of personality states in a work environment. The obtained results provide evidence that within-person variability in personality is associated with variation in face-to-face interactions. Interestingly, the effects differ by type and level of the personality states: adaptation effects for Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, whereby the personality states of an individual trigger similar states in other people interacting with them and complementarity effects for Openness to Experience, whereby the personality states of an individual trigger opposite states in other people interacting with them. Overall, these findings encourage further research to characterize face-to-face and social interactions in terms of their relevance to personality states.