A partial knowledge of friends of friends speeds social search

Milgram empirically showed that people knowing only connections to their friends could locate any person in the U.S. in a few steps. Later research showed that social network topology enables a node aware of its full routing to find an arbitrary target in even fewer steps. Yet, the success of people in forwarding efficiently knowing only personal connections is still not fully explained. To study this problem, we emulate it on a real location-based social network, Gowalla. It provides explicit information about friends and temporal locations of each user useful for studies of human mobility. Here, we use it to conduct a massive computational experiment to establish new necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving social search efficiency. The results demonstrate that only the distribution of friendship edges and the partial knowledge of friends of friends are essential and sufficient for the efficiency of social search. Surprisingly, the efficiency of the search using the original distribution of friendship edges is not dependent on how the nodes are distributed into space. Moreover, the effect of using a limited knowledge that each node possesses about friends of its friends is strongly nonlinear. We show that gains of such use grow statistically significantly only when this knowledge is limited to a small fraction of friends of friends.

Flow matters: antecedents and outcomes of flow experience in social search on Instagram

Purpose This study aims to identify key motivation factors for consumers’ social search and examine the role of flow in the process. This study assessed how content quality (i.e. visual aesthetics, textual information and timeliness) and system quality (i.e., intuitiveness and interactivity) influence flow experience. Additionally, this study tested how mental simulation and ease of task mediate this process and examined how the flow experience leads to purchase intention. Design/methodology/approach An online survey via Amazon MTurk was performed using the general consumer population in the USA. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to test proposed hypotheses. Findings Visual aesthetics, text information, intuitiveness and interactivity were found to increase consumers’ flow experience in social search on Instagram. The timeliness of information was not a significant predictor of flow experience. Additional analyses demonstrated the mediating role of mental simulation and perceived ease of task mediate in flow experience, ultimately leading to increased purchase intention. Practical implications The concept of flow should be taken into consideration in a setting of social media marketing. To create holistic consumption experiences, social media strategy should promote seamless information search by increasing both the content (i.e. visual aesthetics and text information) and system (i.e. intuitiveness and interactivity) quality. Originality/value This study expands the theory of flow by applying it to the social search process in social media. Mental simulation and perceived ease of task are distinctively recognized as essential factors for flow experience on Instagram.

Gamified Approach to Blended Philosophy Course: Social Search and Multilingual Communication Experience

The challenge of updating the existing curriculum to meet the requirements of blended, interactive and gamified approaches is complex. This article presents the design and results of the application of a gamified activity that was used to enrich a blended Philosophy course taught for two years and taken by more than 450 sophomore students in a large public university in Russia. The combination of social search with multilingual communication became an important educational experience for the participating students.

Psychological characteristics of professional activity of the investigator

The article analyzes the components of the psychological characteristics of investigative activities through the prism of compliance with the principles of criminal procedure legislation in the implementation of tactics in the production of investigative actions. High requirements to the level of training of employees of preliminary investigation bodies are emphasized, among which the necessity of formation of knowledge about professionally significant components of psychological characteristics of their further professional activity is highlighted. The authors analyze the main directions of professional activity of the investigator (social, search (cognitive), reconstructive, communicative, organizational and certification activities) during the preliminary investigation of criminal cases. It is noted that the high prestige of the investigator's profession has a positive role, encouraging law graduates to choose a profession that society needs. At the same time, if the graduate is guided solely by considerations of prestige, "romantic aura" of the profession, the prospects of promotion, the level of material security, his motivation can hardly be called positive.