Research

Traditional memetic accounts often borrow the language of biological replication, treating cultural persistence as a problem of copying, mutation, and selection. This paper argues that meaning-bearing cultural forms require a different emphasis. A representation can circulate widely without producing the same interpretation across receivers because its effects depend on the interpretive structures it encounters. The paper therefore reframes cultural persistence around compatibility between features of a sign and the interpretive environment of the receiver.

The model draws on pharmacophore reasoning from computational chemistry and Peircean semiotics. A meme is treated not as an indivisible replicator but as a structured configuration containing features capable of binding with compatible interpretive structures. The larger cultural environment becomes a “memetic reactome” in which representations can activate, inhibit, recombine, or fail to bind depending on context. The framework is primarily theoretical. Its contribution is to make interpretive compatibility, rather than copying fidelity alone, a candidate mechanism for explaining why structurally related cultural forms can produce different effects across populations and contexts.

Weight bias is well documented in employment and interpersonal judgment, but less is known about how it affects behavior once people enter a competitive interaction. Across two studies, this paper examines whether a counterpart's body weight changes how negotiators treat that person when meaningful resources are at stake.

Overweight counterparts receive lower-value offers than otherwise comparable average-weight counterparts. They also receive more negative communication during the negotiation and are evaluated less favorably afterward. The findings therefore move beyond attitudinal prejudice to show that weight bias can shape concrete interpersonal behavior and resource allocation inside a negotiation. The paper identifies several points in the interaction at which stigma can influence treatment, rather than locating the effect only in an initial impression or final evaluation.

Claims that network structure causes behavior are difficult to establish from observational network data because ties, positions, individual characteristics, and outcomes often develop together. This chapter examines experimentation as a way to separate those processes. By manipulating networks, information flow, or relational conditions directly, researchers can make stronger causal claims about how network structures affect individual and collective outcomes.

The chapter reviews experimental designs used in network research and discusses the opportunities created by computer-mediated experiments, online recruitment, and crowdsourced participant pools. The larger methodological argument is that networks are not restricted to observational study. Many relational processes can be reconstructed experimentally in environments where the researcher controls the structure, measures the resulting behavior, and tests mechanisms that would otherwise remain entangled with selection and network formation.

People high in trait neuroticism have been observed to move toward the periphery of social networks over time, but an association between personality and network position does not explain how that movement occurs. This paper develops two possible mechanisms. Other people may find highly neurotic actors less attractive as relationship partners and restrict their access to advantageous positions, or highly neurotic actors may themselves avoid positions that offer greater connectivity because those positions also carry interpersonal costs.

Four experiments find evidence for both processes. Potential partners perceive highly neurotic actors as less likable and are less willing to nominate them to better-connected positions. At the same time, highly neurotic actors recognize the benefits of central positions but perceive greater costs and sometimes decline the opportunity to occupy them. Network position is therefore produced jointly by choices made by the focal actor and reactions from surrounding others, providing a mechanism through which individual traits can become structural outcomes.

Physical attractiveness predicts a wide range of economic and interpersonal outcomes. This paper asks whether one pathway to those advantages runs through social-network structure itself. Rather than treating attractive people only as recipients of favorable treatment, the studies examine whether attractiveness is associated with how people position themselves within networks and the kinds of networks they ultimately occupy.

In an experiment, more attractive participants are more likely to select brokerage positions that connect otherwise separated parts of a network. A second study using network data from young professionals finds that more attractive people report relatively less dense networks, consistent with greater brokerage opportunity. The findings therefore identify attractiveness as a possible antecedent of network structure and suggest that some advantages associated with attractiveness may accumulate through differential access to social capital, not only through direct favorable judgments by others.

Models of diffusion often assume that information moves from person to person without changing. This experiment starts from the opposite premise: human transmission is error prone, message formats differ in how vulnerable they are to mutation, and attempts to correct errors may themselves alter what circulates. Participants transmit messages through experimental communication chains using formats that vary in their susceptibility to error.

Higher-entropy message formats generate more transmission errors than lower-entropy formats. Correction improves preservation of the original meaning, but it also creates a larger number of distinct descendant forms when correction itself fails. Error correction can therefore have two consequences at once: greater fidelity to the original and greater diversity among the variants that enter circulation. The study shows why diffusion models need to represent transformation as well as transmission and establishes the earlier foundation for the current computational work on correction as constrained variation.

People act on social networks partly through their perceptions of who is connected to whom. This paper asks whether an immediately preceding social experience can systematically distort those perceptions. Across two studies, participants experience or recall social exclusion and then evaluate unfamiliar network structures, allowing the research to distinguish errors in network cognition from differences in the actual network.

Social exclusion leads participants to perceive novel social networks as more densely connected than they are. The effect is specific to social networks rather than equivalent geographical structures. In a follow-up experiment using animated social interactions, excluded participants are more likely to perceive ties that do not exist, while exclusion does not comparably increase failures to notice existing ties. The findings show that network cognition is not simply an imperfect representation of objective structure. An observer's own social experience can change the kinds of structural errors that observer makes.

Negotiators form impressions of one another before bargaining begins, and visually available cues can shape expectations about how a counterpart will behave. This paper examines facial femininity separately from the sex of the counterpart, asking whether more feminine facial features activate expectations of cooperativeness and thereby change strategic behavior.

Participants prefer more feminine-faced people when choosing their own negotiation counterpart, consistent with an expectation that these counterparts will be easier to work with. The preference reverses when participants choose someone to act as their own negotiating agent, suggesting that the initial preference is strategic rather than simply aesthetic. A second experiment directly shows that feminine facial features cue expectations of cooperativeness and lead negotiators to make greater demands of those counterparts. The work illustrates how an impression formed before substantive interaction can alter the bargaining behavior that follows.

Some evolutionary accounts of cooperation assume that altruistic individuals recognize one another and preferentially form relationships with similarly altruistic people. That mechanism would produce altruism homophily: networks in which cooperative dispositions cluster because altruists selectively associate with one another. This paper asks whether the ability to detect altruistic tendencies in strangers actually produces that pattern in established relationships.

Across three studies using different methods and measures, the authors find no evidence that friends are more similar in altruistic disposition than would be expected otherwise. People also have relatively poor insight into the altruism of their friends. The results suggest that dispositional recognition may matter less once relationships become embedded and repeated interaction allows reciprocity and observed behavior to organize cooperation. Sustained cooperation therefore does not require networks to assort people according to an underlying altruistic type.

Status is usually represented as a person's current position in a hierarchy. This paper asks whether that snapshot leaves out information people actually use when judging rank. Across five studies, the authors hold final rank constant while varying how a person, product, or institution arrived there. The comparison isolates status momentum: whether the target has been moving upward or downward through the hierarchy.

Targets that ascend to a given rank are judged as having higher status than targets that descend to exactly the same rank. Those judgments have consequences for willingness to pay, pricing recommendations, and how much influence people accept from the target. Expectations about future status help explain the effect. The studies also identify an asymmetry involving the self: people receive a status premium for their own upward movement but are more forgiving of their own downward movement than they are of equivalent decline in others. Status judgments therefore incorporate trajectory as well as current position.

Network exchange theory predicts behavior partly from the structural opportunities and constraints actors occupy, while research on social value orientation distinguishes people who are relatively individualistic, prosocial, or competitive. This paper joins those two traditions formally, asking what happens when actors occupying the same exchange structure value outcomes differently.

The resulting mathematical model generates predictions about the exchanges and negotiations different combinations of actors should produce in dyads and larger power structures. The contribution is theoretical rather than an empirical estimate from observed populations. It demonstrates that formal network-exchange models can incorporate heterogeneous utilities without abandoning precise predictions and provides a set of baseline expectations that can subsequently be tested experimentally. More broadly, the paper makes individual preference and relational structure parts of the same explanatory system rather than treating one as an alternative to the other.