Social Selection and Peer Influence in an Online Social Network
This article maps the homogeneity of social networks on Facebook. Researchers captured network and profile information from students at a U.S. college once a year between March 2006 and March 2009. They then classified students’ 100 most popular self-reported book, movie and music preferences, identified defining attributes of the students’ social networks, and then correlated these data to discover patterns related to tastes, friend selections and shared preferences.
There are several interesting findings in the article. First, by far the greatest predictors of friendship are geographic, academic, and social proximity, or what the authors call “mere propinquity.” If two people live in the same building, the odds they will be friends increase significantly; the odds increase only slightly less substantially if they are in the same academic field.
Also, students are somewhat more likely to become friends with people from their own socioeconomic or racial group. If two individuals have a single friend in common, they are only somewhat more likely to become friends.
Students pick friends based on their tastes and do not typically form taste preferences based on friends’ choices. This result is particularly significant with social clusters that favourite/classic rock or classical/jazz; these students “display a significant tendency to form and maintain friendships with others who express tastes in the same cluster.”
Fans of dark satire or raunchy comedy/gore movies also tend to self-segregate and are “significantly more likely than chance to become and remain friends.”
An exception to this finding is the classical/jazz music cluster; an individual with Facebook friends who prefer this genre is significantly more likely to gain a taste for that type of music himself than a student who has no such friends.
Professor Benson mentioned in class before that if two individuals have a single friend in common, they are more likely to be friends themselves, which can be found in this article. I boosted an interest in the features of friendship and social networks. There are lots of interesting conclusion in this article, which can be seen as an extension of the class.
Bibliography:
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252911/
2. https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/social-selection-peer-influence-online-social-network