Position vs. Attitude: How Topological Factors Influence Our Difference in the Attitudes on Online Interrelationships? A Case Study with Language Use

Abstract

Though current researches of online collaboration often study the social relationship from an objective view, individuals’ subjective attitudes on their interrelationships are more important for collaboration. Inspired by sociolinguistic theories, the latest work indicates that individuals’ different attitudes on interrelationships can be measured by interactive language. However, it is still an open problem that what kind of factors influences our different attitudes on interrelationships. In this work, we investigate how individuals’ position i.e., the topological factors in social network influence the differences in our bidirectional attitudes on interrelationships. Measuring the attitudes with interactive language on Enron email dataset, we analyze the correlation between attitudes and the topological factors of email network. The results indicate that individuals’ differences in attitudes on interrelationships are related to some typical topological factors. These results inspire us to measure individuals’ attitude in online collaboration with their topological factors in social network.