During his research visit at CSH, Enrico Fenoaltea (University of Fribourg) is presenting a talk on Wednesday, March 23, at 3 PM via Zoom.
Please send us an email if you would like to join the talk.
Title: “Robustness of Cohesion in Group Formation”
Abstract:
A group is a collection of individuals who share common interests and group cohesion is the extent to which group members are attached to the group and its goals. Cohesion is fundamental for the function of a social group: Empirical studies show that cohesive groups perform better and live longer. Understanding the factors that contribute to forming a cohesive group thus has important practical implications. To investigate the interplay between group growth and cohesion, we propose a stochastic model where a group grows by a noisy admission process of new members that can be of two different types, and cohesion is defined as the fraction of members of the same type. Our model can reproduce the empirically reported decrease of cohesion with the group size. However, when new admissions require a consensus of several members, we find a phase transition belonging to the mean-field universality class: below a critical noise level, a growing group can remain cohesive.