Culture
Scientists May Have Decoded Your Social Circle
Researchers studying the shape of our social networks make some startling findings.
To Felix Reed-Tsochas, your social circle is less a circle than an onion.
"You can imagine the different layers," he says by Skype from Oxford, where he's a lecturer in complex systems (with a background in theoretical condensed matter physics) at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School. "From my perspective, there's a bunch of really close friends – these are the people who will drop everything, and rush to me if I'm in an emergency. That's the inner layer of the onion. The next layer is the really close friends, but they're not quite in that category. Then maybe there are looser friends."