Facebook Study Reveals Why We Friend Each Other

Why are you friends with your friends? Is it because they share the same racial background as you? Or because they are of the same ethnicity as you? Or is it for an entirely different reason? Previous research on this topic focused on the these obvious aspects of people's background to learn how we choose who we're friends with. However, with the help of Facebook, researchers have found a new way of looking at frienships, and their findings may surprise you. Researchers Andreas Wimmer from UCLA and Kevin Lewis from Harvard followed 736 college freshmen who posted and tagged photos of their new college friends. Using housing data from the University records, Wimmer and Lewis were able to statistically analyze dozens of shared characteristics from Facebook friends who tagged each other on Facebook. The researchers decided to study college freshmen because most of them did not know each other previously, so this allowed them to study the formation of new friendships. They also chose to use tagging behavior as an indication of friendship rather than simply Facebook friending, since tagging indicates real-life interactions outside of Facebook. Although Facebook approved this research, the researchers were still restricted to Facebook's privacy settings for their data. Wimmer and Lewis found that although it may seem like people are more likely to friend those of the same race on the surface, the data actually shows that this is due to our tendency to friend those of the same ethnicity and country of origin. Asian students are especially likely to form friendships because of ethnicity and country of origin, friending each other three times more frequently than if these relationships were based on chance alone. Vietnamese students were the most likely to friend other Vietnamese students. "We've been able to show that just because two people of the same racial background are hanging out together, it's not necessarily because they share the same racial background," said Lewis. In fact, the biggest reason for friending someone was social pressure. The tendency to return a friendly gesture turned out to be 7 times stronger in forging friendships than the attraction from being of the same racial background. If someone decides to be your friend and acts like your friend, you're going to become their friend in return and will also probably friend their friends, regardless of their racial background. "Two students with the same racial background can also become friends because they follow norms of how to make friends, not only because of racial preference," Wimmer said. "If only to avoid tensions in one's social circles, friendships are often returned and friends of friends tend to become friends among themselves." Other strong motivations for friending someone were attending an elite prep school (twice as strong as same race) and being from a state with a particularly distinctive identity such as Illinois and Hawaii (up to 2.5 times stronger than same race). Having the same major and living in the same dorm as someone was just as strong of a motivator for forming friendships as being of the same race. Do you think researchers focus too much on race as the explanation for people's behavior? [likebox pageid='143006345735452' text='Become a fan of Psychworld to stay up to date on the latest Facebook psychology trends.'] Natasha Murashev is the author of PsychWorld.com, a digital publication focused on applied psychology. Article image via scu.

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Facebook Study Reveals Why We Friend Each Other

Natasha Murashev

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Natasha Murashev