Cognitive maps of social features enable flexible inference in social networks

  • How do people learn the large, complex web of social relations around them? We test how people use information about social features (such as being part of the same club or sharing hobbies) to fill in gaps in their knowledge of friendships and to make inferences about unobserved friendships in the social network. We find the ability to infer friendships depends on a simple but inflexible heuristic that infers friendship when two people share the same features, and a more complex but flexible cognitive map that encodes relationships between features rather than between people. Our results reveal that cognitive maps play a powerful role in shaping how people represent and reason about relationships in a social network.

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