1/5 Many social relationships are short-lived, but little is known about the factors that affect their emergence and duration. Our new paper royalsocietypublishing.org/d… with @MailunZ, @simonecent, @Sam_GB_Roberts, @brulepri, and @lopezmodeler examines these factors.

5/5 Overall these results suggest that transient alters are an important part of people’s social networks, with alters with a longer lifetime receiving a greater volume of calls early in the relationship and consistent findings across three countries

4/5 The eventual lifetime of these alters can be predicted from the volume of communication in the early part of the relationship (between 30 and 60 days), suggesting a ‘sorting process’ early in the relationship of alters with different lifetimes

3/5 Across all three countries, the volume of communication to groups of transient alters is stable over the lifetime of the alter, with those relationships that last longer (a long lifetime) receiving a greater call volume than those with a short lifetime

2/5 Some social relationships only last a short time, but how do communication patterns in these relationships change over their lifetime. In this new @SciReports paper we examined these 'transient alters' using mobile data from UK, US and Italy

The Stability of Transient Relationships, our paper with @lopezmodeler, @simonecent, @Sam_GB_Roberts, @brulepri, and @RobinDunbar10 nature.com/articles/s41598-0… cc @CSS_GMU @Mason_CDS 1/5