The Architecture of Small Networks: Strong Interaction and Dynamic Organization in Small Social Systems *

Abstract

A new theoretical model of social interaction, conceptualized here as a hyperstructure, provides the basis for simulation experiments designed to explore the network effects of high frequency social dynamics, or strong interactions. Based on neurophysiological discoveries of brain-behavior mechanisms at work in attachment, the theoretical model provides a nonreductionistic understanding of how biological forces constrain social interaction and yield effects that propagate beyond dyads into wider social networks. The network effects of the model are equivalent to patterns long recognized in sociological research on personal networks, showing that the model can reproduce empirically familiar and sometimes surprising bottom-up discoveries about network dynamics. Additionally, the model provides sociological theory with a straightforward computational approach to discovering how deep structural principles at work in all complex systems also yield a social architecture—specifically, how a system/subsystem architecture, first described by Herbert Simon, emerges when strong interactions partition persons into naturally occurring subsystems.