Social Networks, Dyad Effects On

Deliberate Efforts to Change the Perception and Behavior of Network Members

Relational partners often deliberately seek support or resources for their relationship from other members of their social networks. Researchers have found that, during the initiation of relationships, network members are regularly recruited to make introductions, facilitate meetings, relay information, and promote a positive image of one prospective partner in the eyes of the other.

Deliberate attempts to enlist or influence network members continue as relationships develop. Leigh Leslie and her colleagues found that 85 percent of young people in romantic relationships had attempted to influence one or both parents. They used multiple strategies (e.g., emphasizing the partner's good points, talking about how well the partner treats them, reassuring their parents that they are still valued). At the other end of the relational life cycle, participants in troubled relationships commonly enlist network members as confidants, supporters, and even coconspirators in efforts to end the relationship. But these intentional, self-interested attempts [Page 1541]to “work the network” only hint at the myriad ways in which events inside a given relationship spread outward and affect other relationships and the overall structure of the network.

Unintentional Effects on Perception and Behavior of Network Members

Many of the effects of dyadic relationships on networks are beyond the vision of the relational participants. For example, regardless of whether they know it, their relationship provides others with a point of comparison for evaluating their own relationships. Married couples commonly compare their marriages to the marriages of their friends. Thus, the friends' marriages become reference points that influence perceptions and behaviors within the network.

Individuals will also be influenced in more diffuse ways. As they observe others and as they hear gossip, they will infer rules and norms to be applied to their own relationships. Social-psychological research on conformity in group settings demonstrates that people will adjust their attitudes and perceptions in response to perceived consistencies in what others think or do. Face-to-face interaction enhances these effects, but researchers have found similar, although less robust, conformity effects in computer-mediated settings where face-to-face contact was absent.

Other subtle effects on the perceptions of network members occur as well. For example, research in settings where there are sharp intergroup differences, such as between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, demonstrates that people will be more tolerant of those in the opposing group when they discover that their close associates have friends in that group.

Dyads may become the critical nodes in a larger process of diffusion or contagion. The decision of whether to discuss a topic with a partner is not just a dyadic event. It also functions as an information gate structuring the flow of information through a network. Those who disclose may attempt to limit retransmission of the information to others, but research suggests that these efforts are rarely successful. People promise not to tell, but they do. Nor are these effects limited to information. In a study in a U.S. high school, for example, Peter Bearman and his colleagues found that more than 50 percent of sexually active students were linked to each other in a single sexual network. Nearly half of these students reported that they had been sexually monogamous—having sex with just one person and no one else—but they were nonetheless linked to everyone else in the network by virtue of their partner's less monogamous behavior. Findings such as these obviously have implications for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, but they also illustrate how choices made within dyads embedded in networks extend to affect the network as a whole.

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