Easiest way to make friends
The article summarized many different ways to make new friends or strengthen existing friendships. It’s easier to make people like one another if they spent more time together, despite of the quality of actual interaction. This gives an explanation of why people tend to befriends others who live or work relatively close by. Compliment others more and be emotionally positive can also help improve relationship with other people and expand our friend circle. For acquaintances who recognizes each other and share mutual friends, the chance of them being introduced or befriends one another increases when the number of mutual friends increases.
The article is relevant to the course because it used research and data to prove Strong Triadic Closure and its application in real life. The more mutual friends two people have on Facebook, the more likely there exists one mutual friend who share strong ties to both. And according to Strong triadic closure, a tie between the two people should form to obey this closure property. So this property justifies why it’s more likely for people to accept friend request when there is a descent number of mutual friends between them. Also we can see an implicit connection between String Triadic Closure and social network structural balance. When the number of mutual friends increases, if we view friendship as “+” and having mutual friends but not actually befriending one another as “-“, the structure is unbalanced for each of the mutual friend. And the more mutual friends two people have, the more incentives for them to be friends to correct the network from unbalanced to balanced.