caa a22 4500 528786229 20181217030314.0 cr unu---uuuuu 180924e20141006xx s 000 0 eng 10.3929/ethz-b-000091213 doi 10.1038/srep06526 doi (ETHRESEARCH)oai:www.research-collection.ethz.ch:20.500.11850/91213 Fuchs Benedikt Fractal multi-level organisation of human groups in a virtual world [Elektronische Daten] [Benedikt Fuchs, Didier Sornette, Stefan Thurner] Sci Rep Open access ethresearch Humans are fundamentally social. They form societies which consist of hierarchically layered nested groups of various quality, size, and structure. The anthropologic literature has classified these groups as support cliques, sympathy groups, bands, cognitive groups, tribes, linguistic groups, and so on. Anthropologic data show that, on average, each group consists of approximately three subgroups. However, a general understanding of the structural dependence of groups at different layers is largely missing. We extend these early findings to a very large high-precision large-scale internet-based social network data. We analyse the organisational structure of a complete, multi-relational, large social multiplex network of a human society consisting of about 400,000 odd players of an open-ended massive multiplayer online game for which we know all about their various group memberships at different layers. Remarkably, the online players' society exhibits the same type of structured hierarchical layers as found in hunter-gatherer societies. Our findings suggest that the hierarchical organisation of human society is deeply nested in human psychology. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0 ethresearch Applied physics ethresearch Complex networks ethresearch Sornette Didier joint author Thurner Stefan joint author Scientific Reports London : Nature Publishing Group 4, p. 6526 2045-2322 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/91213 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) 1 Journal Article ethresearch ETHRESEARCH 856 40 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/91213 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) ETHRESEARCH 100 1- Fuchs Benedikt ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Sornette Didier joint author ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Thurner Stefan joint author ETHRESEARCH 773 0- Scientific Reports London : Nature Publishing Group 4, p. 6526 2045-2322 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH Journal Article Open access