Nicholas A. Christakis

Although psychological theory views behavior as an interaction between person and situation, the measurement of metacognition often relies on situation-free, abstract self-views. To align measurement with interactionist frameworks, we proposed a situated approach, using intellectual humility (IH)—recognizing one’s limits and fallibility—as a proof-of-concept. We validated this approach across diverse populations: English- and Spanish-speaking North Americans (N = 633) and adults from 136 rural Honduran villages (N = 2567). Rather than rating abstract tendencies, participants reconstructed three recent disagreements (freely chosen, wrong, and right) and reported specific behaviors via branching binary probes. This method demonstrated cross-cultural coherence of the IH construct while capturing substantial situational variability. Notably, 74–81% of variance occurred within persons: IH expression fluctuated significantly based on epistemic context (being wrong vs. right) and social dynamics (partner status). These situational effects also fully explained gender differences in the Honduran sample. The situated approach showed efficiency outside Western, educated contexts and helps overcome the humility paradox—wherein the least intellectually humble overclaim their humility. We discuss four principles for aligning measurement with theory—contextual specificity, sampling from actual experiences via event reconstruction, accessibility across diverse populations via branching probes, and modeling within-person variability—offering a framework for assessing metacognitive and self-regulatory constructs beyond the constraints of static dispositional measures.

Multiplex social networks capture multiple types of relations among the same people. Their structure reflects how exchanges arise from individual attributes related to independence, the status or resources of others related to dependence, and mutual influence related to interdependence. Understanding these systems is challenging because layers can play distinct yet complementary roles. We introduce the Multiplex Latent Trade-off Model, MLT, a framework for identifying roles in multiplex networks that incorporates independence, dependence, and interdependence. MLT represents roles as trade-offs, requiring each node to distribute source and target roles across layers while allocating community memberships within hierarchical structures. Applying MLT to 176 multiplex networks, including social, health, and economic layers from villages in western Honduras, we identify core principles of social exchange and reveal multi-scale communities. Link-prediction analyses show that modeling interdependence most improves predictions for social ties, whereas health and economic ties are shaped more strongly by individual status and behavior.

People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. We develop a sampling strategy to evaluate network cognition in 10,072 adults across 82 Honduras villages and systematically map the underlying village networks. In 17 villages, we also discern the genetic relatedness of all 1,333 residents. Observers overestimate the social interactions among kin and are 33.38 percentage points (J) more accurate in judgements of ties between non-kin (95% confidence interval: 31.27–35.49). Counterintuitively, observers had more accurate beliefs about non-kin pairs, especially when the observers were popular, middle-aged, or educated. Observers were less able to accurately judge ties across different religions or wealth. Individuals in villages that cultivate coffee, requiring coordinated effort, demonstrated greater bias to view networks as connected. Finally, more accurate respondents had better access to information that we experimentally introduced to their peers. Overall, people inflate the number of connections in their networks and exhibit varying accuracy and bias, with implications for how people affect and are affected by the social world.