Social structures emerge as a result of individuals managing a variety of
different of social relationships. Societies can be represented as highly
structured dynamic multiplex networks. Here we study the dynamical origins of
the specific community structures of a large-scale social multiplex network of
a human society that interacts in a virtual world of a massive multiplayer
online game. There we find substantial differences in the community structures
of different social actions, represented by the various network layers in the
multiplex. Community size distributions are either similar to a power-law or
appear to be centered around a size of 50 individuals. To understand these
observations we propose a voter model that is built around the principle of
triadic closure. It explicitly models the co-evolution of node- and
link-dynamics across different layers of the multiplex. Depending on link- and
node fluctuation rates, the model exhibits an anomalous shattered fragmentation
transition, where one layer fragments from one large component into many small
components. The observed community size distributions are in good agreement
with the predicted fragmentation in the model. We show that the empirical
pairwise similarities of network layers, in terms of link overlap and degree
correlations, practically coincide with the model. This suggests that several
detailed features of the fragmentation in societies can be traced back to the
triadic closure processes.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
