I am currently finishing a PhD in network physics and have been thinking about this exact topic for a while. It seems reasonable to me that the way we handle inter-individual cooperation is cognitively limited in some way by the Dunbar number. Moreover, some other topological constraints could also occur. In their 1998 milestone paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/30918), Watts and Strogatz basically explained that in a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, the higher the number of shortcuts, the less likely the emergence of cooperation. These shortcuts are randomly connected “long-range” edges, differing from the regular “friend-of-friend” edges. Such long-range edges are omnipresent in online social networks. I think it could be highly beneficial for society to get used to defining the processes where human-scale mechanisms are “overwhelmed”, leading to strong biases and unexpected behaviors. Online social life, I believe, is one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon.
I am currently finishing a PhD in network physics and have been thinking about this exact topic for a while. It seems reasonable to me that the way we handle inter-individual cooperation is cognitively limited in some way by the Dunbar number. Moreover, some other topological constraints could also occur. In their 1998 milestone paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/30918), Watts and Strogatz basically explained that in a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, the higher the number of shortcuts, the less likely the emergence of cooperation. These shortcuts are randomly connected “long-range” edges, differing from the regular “friend-of-friend” edges. Such long-range edges are omnipresent in online social networks.
I think it could be highly beneficial for society to get used to defining the processes where human-scale mechanisms are “overwhelmed”, leading to strong biases and unexpected behaviors. Online social life, I believe, is one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon.