Despite converging evidence for the importance of relational mobility on shaping people’s social experiences, previous work suggested mixed findings for its influence on the structure of sociocentric networks, which lays the basis for the development of all types of social relationships. Additionally, as it is timely and economically intractable to administer such longitudinal experiments in real-life settings, most previous work mainly relied on cross-sectional correlation analyses and provided limited causal evidence. The current research used an agent-based modeling approach to examine whether higher relational mobility (i.e., the number of opportunities to meet new people) would promote integration among social networks over time. Using parameters derived from survey data, we simulated how the integration of sociocentric social networks evolves under different levels of relational mobility. Based on the data of three network structural indicators, including modularity, global efficiency, and standard deviation of nodal betweenness, we obtained causal evidence supporting that higher relational mobility promotes greater network integration. These findings highlight the power of socioecological demands on our social experiences.

尽管有大量证据表明关系流动对塑造人们的社会体验的重要性，但之前的研究表明，它对社会中心网络结构的影响有不同的发现，这为所有类型的社会关系的发展奠定了基础。此外，由于在现实生活环境中管理此类纵向实验是及时且经济上难以处理的，因此以前的大多数工作主要依赖于横截面相关性分析，并提供了有限的因果证据。目前的研究使用基于代理的建模方法来检查更高的关系流动性（即结识新朋友的机会数量）是否会随着时间的推移促进社交网络之间的整合。使用从调查数据中得出的参数，我们模拟了以社会为中心的社交网络的整合如何在不同的关系流动性水平下演变。基于三个网络结构指标的数据，包括模块性、全局效率和节点介数的标准差，我们获得了支持更高的关系移动性促进更大的网络集成的因果证据。这些发现强调了社会生态需求对我们的社会经验的影响。