A team of researchers of the University of California, San Diego, the same team who analyzed the way obesity, smoking and happiness spread among social groups, decided to see if genes have an impact on people’s ability to communicate and to their tendency to be the center of attention in a group.

 

For the study, the researchers studied more than one thousand twins from a sample of more than 90,000 teenagers. They compared the differences and similarities in social behavior of identical twins to those of fraternal twins. The researchers analysed the relations inside a particular student’s group of friends.

 

At the end of the study, the researchers observed that identical twins, who share 50 percent of their genes, were more likely to have similar social behaviors compared to fraternal twins, who showed different patterns of social ties. The study found greater similarity between the identical twins' social network structure compared to the social networks of non-identical twins.

 

The study suggests that our genes predict whether or not two of our friends are going to be friends with one another or not. In other words, the study has found that there is a genetic tendency to introduce your friends to each other. Those who were in the middle of a social network had friends who knew one each other.

 

The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Last year, they published a study showing that happiness can be contagious, spreading like a virus from one person to another inside the social network.