The social phenomenon of familiar strangers was identified by Stanley Milgram in 1972 with a small-scale experiment. However, there has been limited research focusing on uncovering the phenomenon at a societal scale and simultaneously investigating the social relationships between familiar strangers. With the help of the large-scale mobile phone records, we empirically show the existence of the...

A gambling game was used to test whether individuals in the company of friends would take greater risk than individuals in the presence of strangers. Undergraduate males and females (N=46) played a word puzzle game on wheels that offered high-gain/high-risk, low-gain/low-risk alternatives. Across three trials, results supported predictions that participants in the presence of friends exhibited ...

A Recent [14] model demonstrated that image scoring produces high cooperation between strangers in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). Here we outline a simpler approach in which players – which are either pure cooperators or defectors – can sustain cooperation with strangers by biasing game interactions towards others with the same tags (arbitrary bit strings representing “cultural markers” [11]). In...

A survey of market women was conducted in Benin City. These women are vulnerable to HIV/AIDS and STD infections since their trading activities involve long-distance travelling away from families and sexual exposure to strangers. The questionnaire included questions on socioeconomic background, sexual and health behaviour. Results indicate that there is a high level of sexual networking, especia...

Virtual Strangers is a tool for visualizing a community and identifying interesting individuals within that community. Using life-sized 3D animation and spatialized natural audio it provides a sense of being physically immersed in the group being visualized. Individuals in the community are represented using the same ambient cues that are available in a human crowd, including abstractions of ph...