Geard, Nicholas, and Seth Bullock. “Group formation and social evolution: a computational model.” (2008): 197-203.
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The tendency to organise into groups is a fundamental property of human nature. Despite this, many models of social network evolution consider the emergence of community structure as a side effect of other processes, rather than as a mechanism driving social evolution. We present a model of social network evolution in which the group formation process forms the basis of the rewiring mechanism. Exploring the behaviour of our model, we find that rewiring on the basis of group membership reorganises the network structure in a way that, while initially facilitating the growth of groups, ultimately inhibits it.