How do social interactions evolve when people live and work together for months in one of the most isolated and extreme environments on Earth? A new study involving researchers from ISI Foundation explores this question by examining the social dynamics of crews stationed at the Italian–French Concordia Research Station in Antarctica.
The research builds on ISI Foundation’s long-standing expertise in measuring and analyzing social networks through pervasive sensing technologies. Over the past fifteen years, the Foundation has contributed to the development of the SocioPatterns initiative, an international research effort that has carried out large-scale studies of human interactions in a wide variety of settings, including schools, hospitals, households, conferences, and rural communities in Africa.
For this study, researchers deployed SocioPatterns wearable proximity sensors during a 10-month overwinter mission at Concordia Station. Located on the Antarctic plateau and inaccessible for much of the year, Concordia is considered one of the closest terrestrial analogues to future long-duration space missions, offering a unique opportunity to investigate human behavior under conditions of prolonged isolation and confinement.
The wearable sensors enabled the collection of high-resolution data on face-to-face interactions among crew members throughout the mission. These measurements were combined with longitudinal psychological assessments, allowing researchers to examine how patterns of social interaction and team dynamics changed over time in response to the challenges of the environment.
The study was led by Andrea Cantisani and Jan Schmutz and involved an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers, including Pedro Marques-Quinteiro, Mirko Antino, Walter Eppich, Katharina Stegmeyer, and Sebastian Walther. ISI Foundation contributed through the work of Lorenzo Dall’Amico and Ciro Cattuto, bringing expertise in computational social science, network analysis, and sensor-based measurement of human interactions.
The findings contribute to a growing body of research on teamwork, resilience, and social adaptation in isolated, confined, and extreme environments, with potential implications for future space exploration as well as for other contexts where groups must operate under prolonged conditions of confinement and limited external contact.
Paper published in PNAS here
Learn more about the SocioPatterns project: https://sociopatterns.org/