Popularity, Similarity, and the Network Extraversion Bias

Abstract

Using the emergent friendship network of an incoming cohort of students in an M.B.A. program, we examined the role of extraversion in shaping social networks. Extraversion has two important implications for the emergence of network ties: a popularity effect, in which extraverts accumulate more friends than introverts do, and a homophily effect, in which the more similar are two people's levels of extraversion, the more likely they are to become friends. These effects result in a systematic network extraversion bias, in which people's social networks will tend to be overpopulated with extraverts and underpopulated with introverts. Moreover, the most extraverted people have the greatest network extraversion bias, and the most introverted people have the least network extraversion bias. Our finding that social networks were systematically misrepresentative of the broader social environment raises questions about whether there is a societal bias toward believing other people are more extraverted than they actually are and whether introverts are better socially calibrated than extraverts.

The Big Five personality traits, Big Two metatraits and social media: A meta-analysis

“…It is likely that extraverts will engage in higher amounts of social activity on SNS because they are reward seeking and sociable. Prior studies on SNS have consistently found that extraverts not only spend more time on SNS (Wilson, Fornasier, and White, 2010), had more Facebook friends (Ong et al, 2010;Ross et al, 2009), and also are central in many social networks (Feiler & Kleinbaum, 2015).…”

Spontaneous Neural Encoding of Social Network Position

“…It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/098988 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 9, 2017; encode extraversion 22 , which is modestly correlated with EC 25 , suggesting that this region may encode dispositional tendencies common to both extraversion and EC. In addition, recent work has also shown that the medial parietal cortex, as well as other regions involved in inferring others' mental states, intentions, and traits (e.g., MPFC; temporoparietal junction), responds preferentially to well-liked individuals, which is thought to reflect perceivers being preferentially motivated to understand the internal states of popular others 26 .…”

Empathy and well-being correlate with centrality in different social networks

“…Who comes to occupy these central network positions? Recent research suggests that individuals' personalities influence their ability to attract social ties (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11),* but this personality-centrality relationship may vary depending on the type of connection that one uses to define a network. For example, extraverts become more central than introverts in networks defined by friendship (6).…”