In a recent report conducted by researchers at Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, genes were found to be involved in a person’s ability to have more or less friends. In other words, genes and evolution may play a major role in social relationships and the way we handle our friendship.  

 

The researchers studied 1,110 twins some identical and the rest fraternal in a population of more than 90,000 adults. Identical siblings have the same genetic material, while fraternal siblings are not genetically identical, but still have a number of genetic similarities.

 

The study found greater similarities between the social ties of identical twins than of fraternal twins. In addition, they found that how interconnected your friends are depends on your genetic material. To be more specific, whether a person has three friends and they know one each other or if another person has the same number of friends, but they don’t know one each other, these different situations are the result of their inherited genes. There appears to be a genetic tendency to introduce your friends to each other, the researchers explained.

 

One of the implications of the study is that if we want to understand how things spread in social networks “we need to take into account people’s locations in the social networks, which are due in part to their genes.” Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, co-author of the study, explained.

 

The researchers suggest there may be an evolutionary explanation for this correlation between genes and sociability and the reason for some people are in the centre of attention while others are at the edges of a group.