Social behaviour is a key component of animal behaviour that facilitates the spread of parasites. Traditionally, group size has been used as a primary metric for quantifying the impact of social behaviour on parasite transmission; however, with the emergence of social network analysis an increasing number of studies are using this more nuanced tool to study links between social behaviour and parasite infection. In this study, we synthesized insights derived from empirical studies on social networks and parasites using a meta-analytical approach. We analysed 210 associations between parasite burden and individual level network metrics extracted from 18 published articles. Overall, we found a positive effect of social behaviour, measured by social network metrics, on parasite infection at the individual level, with no evidence of publication bias. The magnitude of the mean effect size for associations between social network metrics and measures of parasitism was nearly twice as large as that observed for group size in previous meta-analyses. However, there was significant heterogeneity in effect sizes across studies, and this pattern could not be explained by either host traits, parasite traits or the social network metric examined. We discuss potential reasons for this unexplained heterogeneity, such as possible mismatches between focal host social behaviour and focal parasite biology as well as methodological considerations. We also suggest future research directions that can help fill gaps that remain in our understanding of the drivers of variation in interactions between social hosts and parasites.

社会行为是促进寄生虫传播的动物行为的关键组成部分。传统上，群体规模已被用作量化社交行为对寄生虫传播影响的主要指标；但是，随着社交网络分析的出现，越来越多的研究正在使用这种更加细微的工具来研究社交行为与寄生虫感染之间的联系。在这项研究中，我们使用荟萃分析方法综合了从对社交网络和寄生虫的实证研究得出的见解。我们分析了从18篇发表的文章中提取的210种寄生虫负担与个体水平网络指标之间的关联。总体而言，我们发现以社交网络指标衡量的社交行为对个体层面的寄生虫感染有积极影响，没有证据表明发表有偏见。社交网络指标和寄生性指标之间关联的平均效应大小的大小几乎是先前荟萃分析中观察到的小组规模的两倍。但是，在各个研究中，效应大小存在显着的异质性，并且无法通过宿主特征，寄生虫特征或所检查的社交网络指标来解释这种模式。我们讨论了这种无法解释的异质性的潜在原因，例如焦点宿主社会行为与焦点寄生生物学之间可能的不匹配以及方法上的考虑。我们还建议未来的研究方向，以帮助填补我们对社会宿主与寄生虫之间相互作用变异的驱动因素的理解中仍然存在的空白。