Genes affect popularity: UC San Diego Study

by TDH | January 27, 2009 at 04:50 pm

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A recent University of California, San Diego study suggests that a great deal of our social networking habits and inclinations are the result of our genes.

Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, and Christopher Dawes and James Fowler of UC San Diego studied over 1000 adolescent twins from 142 different schools. The group looked at popularity indications such as how many times a particular individual was named as a friend and whether they tended to be at the center of the group or at the periphery. The results of the study show that the social networks of identical twins were far more similar in such factors than those of the fraternal twins. Suggesting that there is a correlation between genes and social habits.

The social networks of identical twins, who share the same genes, were more similar than those of fraternal twins, whose genes differ, indicating a genetic underpinning.

There was more similarity between the social positions of identical twins than of fraternal twins, an indication that the measures of popularity had an inherited component, the researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So, it appears as though all those really popular kids at school were destined to be so; and all those wallflowers out there have only their parents to blame for any inherited social awkwardness

"One of the things that the study tells us is that social networks are likely to be a fundamental part of our genetic heritage," Fowler said in a statement. "It may be that natural selection is acting on not just things like whether or not we can resist the common cold, but also who it is that we are going to come into contact with."