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Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school's social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20-32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 30% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more "social referent" students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonhuman primates use social touch for maintenance and reinforcement of social structures, yet the role of social touch in human bonding in different reproductive, affiliative, and kinship-based relationships remains unresolved. Here we reveal quantified, relationship-specific maps of bodily regions where social touch is allowed in a large cross-cultural dataset (N = 1,368 from Finland, France, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom). Participants were shown front and back silhouettes of human bodies with a word denoting one member of their social network. They were asked to color, on separate trials, the bodily regions where each individual in their social network would be allowed to touch them. Across all tested cultures, the total bodily area where touching was allowed was linearly dependent (mean r² = 0.54) on the emotional bond with the toucher, but independent of when that person was last encountered. Close acquaintances and family members were touched for more reasons than less familiar individuals. The bodily area others are allowed to touch thus represented, in a parametric fashion, the strength of the relationship-specific emotional bond. We propose that the spatial patterns of human social touch reflect an important mechanism supporting the maintenance of social bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the career of Matthew O. Jackson, professor of Economics at Stanford University, professor of economics at Stanford University in California, social and economic research. The focus of Jackson and other economists on social and economic networks in their field of study is explored. The method of mapping networks in a number of rural villages in India by Jackson and his colleagues with the idea of tracing how microfinance spread through the areas is also examined.

A correction to the article "Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools" which appeared in the previous is presented.

A correction to the article "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" by Adam D. I. Kramer, Jeffrey T. Hancock and Jamie E. Guillory in the June 17, 2014 issue is presented.

The article presents an editorial expression on the article "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" by Adam D. I. Kramer, Jeffrey T. Hancock and Jamie E. Guillory in the June 17, 2014 issue.