HUMAN VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: AFFINITY AND COMMUNICATION DYNAMICS

The target of the present study is to explore the relations between the anity among individual and their communication dynamics. We designed three different experimental tasks (social problem), with a crescent degree of social complexity, in order to test the impact of different social constraints on the evolution of the affinity network, as well as on the dynamics of communication. Our aim is to dene the \cognitive recipes" used by the subjects to solve the required social problems. Our results show that the complexity of the social problem aects the relation between anity and communication networks, in uencing at the same time both anity and opinion. We use the sociophysics and social cognitive models in order to interpret the results, showing the limits of the most diused sociophysics models when aiming at forecasting the dynamics of a small group.