Although the evidence is still limited, a growing body of research suggests music may have beneficial effects for diseases such as Parkinson’s.
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Edited by Kenneth Wachter, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved November 15, 2011 (received for review June 16, 2011)
Abstract
Disentangling the effects of selection and influence is one of social science's greatest unsolved puzzles: Do people befriend others who are similar to them, or do they become more similar to their friends over time? Recent advances in stochastic actor-based modeling, combined with self-reported data on a popular online social network site, allow us to address this question with a greater degree of precision than has heretofore been possible. Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends—except for tastes in classical/jazz music. These findings shed light on the mechanisms responsible for observed network homogeneity; provide a statistically rigorous assessment of the coevolution of cultural tastes and social relationships; and suggest important qualifications to our understanding of both homophily and contagion as generic social processes.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kmlewis{at}fas.harvard.edu.
Author contributions: K.L., M.G., and J.K. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1109739109/-/DCSupplemental.
Social selection and peer influence in an online social network
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