Los peligros de la obediencia

Artículo considerado un clásico en el ámbito de la psicología social, describe los resultados de la investigación realizada por su autor en los años sesenta del siglo pasado, los que muestran que una considerable mayoría de personas normales, en acatamiento a la autoridad, pueden realizar conductas éticamente reprobables que causan daño a otros. Estas conclusiones confirman, experimentalmente, la hipótesis de la Escuela de Frankfurt de que existe en todos nosotros una dimensión autoritaria de la personalidad, que en la mayoría de las personas genera una obediencia incondicional a la autoridad.Cet article est considéré comme un classique dans le domaine de la psychologie sociale, décrivant les résultats d’une enquête réalisée par son auteur dans les années soixante du siècle passé, qui démontrent qu’une majorité considérable de personnes normales, obéissant à l’autorité, peuvent faire preuve de conduite éthiquement blâmables faisant du mal à d’autres. Ces conclusions confirment, de manière expérimentale, l’hypothèse de l’Ecole de Francfort quant à l’existence en chacun de nous d’une dimension autoritaire de la personnalité, qui dans la majeure partie des cas entraine une obéissance inconditionnelle à l’autorité.The article, considered a classic in the scope of social psychology, describes the results of an investigation carried out by the author during the sixties of the past century, whose results show that a substantial majority of normal people, in obeying authority, can carry out conducts ethically reprehensible, which harm others. These conclusions confirm, experimentally, the hypothesis of the School of Frankfurt which states that, in all of us, a dimension of authoritarian personality is found, that in most people produces an unconditional obedience to an authority

Los peligros de la obediencia

Artículo considerado un clásico en el ámbito de la psicología social, describe los resultados de la investigación realizada por su autor en los años sesenta del siglo pasado, los que muestran que una considerable mayoría de personas normales, en acatamiento a la autoridad, pueden realizar conductas éticamente reprobables que causan daño a otros. Estas conclusiones confirman, experimentalmente, la hipótesis de la Escuela de Frankfurt de que existe en todos nosotros una dimensión autoritaria de la personalidad, que en la mayoría de las personas genera una obediencia incondicional a la autoridad.Cet article est considéré comme un classique dans le domaine de la psychologie sociale, décrivant les résultats d’une enquête réalisée par son auteur dans les années soixante du siècle passé, qui démontrent qu’une majorité considérable de personnes normales, obéissant à l’autorité, peuvent faire preuve de conduite éthiquement blâmables faisant du mal à d’autres. Ces conclusions confirment, de manière expérimentale, l’hypothèse de l’Ecole de Francfort quant à l’existence en chacun de nous d’une dimension autoritaire de la personnalité, qui dans la majeure partie des cas entraine une obéissance inconditionnelle à l’autorité.The article, considered a classic in the scope of social psychology, describes the results of an investigation carried out by the author during the sixties of the past century, whose results show that a substantial majority of normal people, in obeying authority, can carry out conducts ethically reprehensible, which harm others. These conclusions confirm, experimentally, the hypothesis of the School of Frankfurt which states that, in all of us, a dimension of authoritarian personality is found, that in most people produces an unconditional obedience to an authority

The Web of Human Sexual Contacts

Many ``real-world'' networks are clearly defined while most ``social'' networks are to some extent subjective. Indeed, the accuracy of empirically-determined social networks is a question of some concern because individuals may have distinct perceptions of what constitutes a social link. One unambiguous type of connection is sexual contact. Here we analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents $\alpha \approx 2.4$ for females and males. The scale-free nature of the web of human sexual contacts suggests that strategic interventions aimed at preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases may be the most efficient approach.Comment: 7 pages with 2 eps figures. Latex file. For more details or for downloading the PDF file of the published article see http://polymer.bu.edu/~amaral/WebofContacts.html . For more results on teh structure of complex networks see http://polymer.bu.edu/~amaral/Networks.htm

Structural Patterns and Generative Models of Real-world Hypergraphs

Graphs have been utilized as a powerful tool to model pairwise relationships between people or objects. Such structure is a special type of a broader concept referred to as hypergraph, in which each hyperedge may consist of an arbitrary number of nodes, rather than just two. A large number of real-world datasets are of this form - for example, list of recipients of emails sent from an organization, users participating in a discussion thread or subject labels tagged in an online question. However, due to complex representations and lack of adequate tools, little attention has been paid to exploring the underlying patterns in these interactions. In this work, we empirically study a number of real-world hypergraph datasets across various domains. In order to enable thorough investigations, we introduce the multi-level decomposition method, which represents each hypergraph by a set of pairwise graphs. Each pairwise graph, which we refer to as a k-level decomposed graph, captures the interactions between pairs of subsets of k nodes. We empirically find that at each decomposition level, the investigated hypergraphs obey five structural properties. These properties serve as criteria for evaluating how realistic a hypergraph is, and establish a foundation for the hypergraph generation problem. We also propose a hypergraph generator that is remarkably simple but capable of fulfilling these evaluation metrics, which are hardly achieved by other baseline generator models.Comment: to be published in the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '20

Small-world networks: Evidence for a crossover picture

Watts and Strogatz [Nature 393, 440 (1998)] have recently introduced a model for disordered networks and reported that, even for very small values of the disorder $p$ in the links, the network behaves as a small-world. Here, we test the hypothesis that the appearance of small-world behavior is not a phase-transition but a crossover phenomenon which depends both on the network size $n$ and on the degree of disorder $p$. We propose that the average distance $\ell$ between any two vertices of the network is a scaling function of $n / n^*$. The crossover size $n^*$ above which the network behaves as a small-world is shown to scale as $n^*(p \ll 1) \sim p^{-\tau}$ with $\tau \approx 2/3$.Comment: 5 pages, 5 postscript figures (1 in color), Latex/Revtex/multicols/epsf. Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Fractal Boundaries of Complex Networks

We introduce the concept of boundaries of a complex network as the set of nodes at distance larger than the mean distance from a given node in the network. We study the statistical properties of the boundaries nodes of complex networks. We find that for both Erd\"{o}s-R\'{e}nyi and scale-free model networks, as well as for several real networks, the boundaries have fractal properties. In particular, the number of boundaries nodes {\it B} follows a power-law probability density function which scales as $B^{-2}$. The clusters formed by the boundary nodes are fractals with a fractal dimension $d_{f} \approx 2$. We present analytical and numerical evidence supporting these results for a broad class of networks. Our findings imply potential applications for epidemic spreading

Scale-free models for the structure of business firm networks

We study firm collaborations in the life sciences and the information and communication technology sectors. We propose an approach to characterize industrial leadership using k-shell decomposition, with top-ranking firms in terms of market value in higher k-shell layers. We find that the life sciences industry network consists of three distinct components: a “nucleus,” which is a small well-connected subgraph, “tendrils,” which are small subgraphs consisting of small degree nodes connected exclusively to the nucleus, and a “bulk body,” which consists of the majority of nodes. Industrial leaders, i.e., the largest companies in terms of market value, are in the highest k-shells of both networks. The nucleus of the life sciences sector is very stable: once a firm enters the nucleus, it is likely to stay there for a long time. At the same time we do not observe the above three components in the information and communication technology sector. We also conduct a systematic study of these three components in random scale-free networks. Our results suggest that the sizes of the nucleus and the tendrils in scale-free networks decrease as the exponent of the power-law degree distribution λ increases, and disappear for λ≥3. We compare the k-shell structure of random scale-free model networks with two real-world business firm networks in the life sciences and in the information and communication technology sectors. We argue that the observed behavior of the k-shell structure in the two industries is consistent with the coexistence of both preferential and random agreements in the evolution of industrial networks