Issues in the Emergence of Social Structure

The literature of complex networks in general and small world networks representing social relations in particular have concentrated on algorithms for constructing such networks and such metrics and cluster coefficients, characteristic path lengths, node degree distributions and whether the networks are scale-free. There is nothing in the literature on the process of the emergence and evolution of small world networks which, it is claimed, are good representations of social networks. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether processes that conform to evidence from social psychology and cognitive science will produce small world social networks. The reported simulations indicate that clustering is a natural consequence of such evidence-based phenomena but further elaboration is necessary to maintain the connectedness of small world networks.