Homophilous Friendship Assortment Based on Personality Traits and Cognitive Ability in Middle Childhood: The Moderating Effect of Peer Network Size

Abstract

Even though homophily (love of the same) is often thought of as a standard feature of friendships, the empirical evidence for attraction based on personality trait similarity is mixed at best. One reason for the inconsistent findings across studies could be variation in the large‐scale social environment in which the studies have been conducted. We investigated whether diversity in the everyday social ecologies of 7‐ to 8‐year‐old children (N = 549) moderates whether friendships are formed on the basis of similar personality traits and similar levels of Cognitive ability. Moderated polynomial regression and response surface analyses showed that classroom size moderated homophily based on Openness to Experience: children similar in Openness were more likely to form friendship ties, but only in larger classrooms. Moreover, we found homophily for Cognitive ability, especially among girls. The results for Openness and Cognitive ability were independent of each other. We discuss the social relevance of trait Openness and the notion that capacity to reciprocate underlies homophily based on Cognitive ability. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology

Personality homophily affects male social bonding in wild Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis)

“…Our result that individuals more similar in Connectedness form stronger social bonds supports the hypothesis of a shared evolutionary origin of personality homophily as partner choice strategy in human and non-human primates (Bahns et al, 2016; Massen & Koski, 2014). In humans the personality dimensions most closely matched in friends are extraversion and agreeableness (e.g., Blaz, 1983; Caspi et al, 2005; Dishion, Patterson, Stoolmiller, & Skinner, 1991; Ilmarinen, Vainikainen, Verkasalo, & Lönnqvist, 2017; Maaß, Lämmle, Bensch, & Ziegler, 2016; Markey & Kurtz, 2006; van Zalk & Denissen, 2015; Youyou et al, 2017), which partly resembles our findings. Aspects of the Connectedness trait, like proximity, social tolerance, and friendly approach, roughly correspond to the sociable or affiliative facets of extraversion associated with enjoyment of social interactions (Denissen & Penke, 2008).…”

No evidence for a relationship between social closeness and similarity in resting-state functional brain connectivity in schoolchildren

“…This increased synchronisation between friends is evident even when friends are in the absence of one another; using functional MRI of individual students in a real-world social network, Parkinson and colleagues (2018) investigated synchronisation of neural activation during video clip viewing and found evidence for homophily at the neural response level. Brain regions where response similarity was associated with social network proximity included areas implicated in motivation, learning, affective processing, memory, attention, theory of mind and language processing 8 , some behavioural traits of which have exhibited homophily in previous non-imaging studies 4,5,68,69 . These results suggest that, at least in terms of cognitive processing, similarities in behaviour relate to similarities in brain function.…”

“…Homophilic selection is observed for broad categorical traits such as gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation 1, 2, 3 but also for personal traits such as motivation 4 , personality and cognitive ability 5 , and academic achievement 6 . High school and university students have been found to rearrange their local social networks to form ties and clusters with students who have similar performance levels 6 and this type of homophily has been observed even in polygenic scores for academic achievement 7 .…”

Testing Similarity Effects with Dyadic Response Surface Analysis

“…RSA is gaining momentum as a tool in the personality literature. For example, recent publications investigated the effects of personality similarity on romantic attraction at zero acquaintance (Olderbak, Malter, Wolf, Jones, & Figueredo, 2017), relationship intensity in a network analysis (Ilmarinen, Vainikainen, Verkasalo, & Lönnqvist, 2017), effects of parent-offspring personality similarity on externalizing problems (Franken, Laceulle, Van Aken, & Ormel, 2017), or person-group dissimilarity in personality on peer victimization (Boele, Sijtsema, Klimstra, Denissen, & Meeus, 2017) and self-esteem (Bleidorn et al, 2016). Detailed overviews of further potential applications of RSA can be found in Table 1 in Barranti, Carlson, and Côté (2017) and in Table 1 in Humberg et al (2018).…”