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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Best Friends Forever? Modeling the Mechanisms of Friendship Network Formation

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description

The formation of friendships and alliances is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and likely a crucial component of the cooperative hunting and child-rearing practices that helped our early hominin ancestors survive. Research on contemporary human beings typically finds that strong-tie social networks are fairly small, and reveals a high degree of physical (e.g., age) and social-structural (e.g., educational attainment) homophily. Yet, existing work all too often underestimates, or even ignores, the importance of abstract, symbolic homophily (such as shared identities or worldviews) as a driver of friendship formation. Here we employ agent-based modeling to identify the optimal variable weights influencing friendship formation in order to best replicate the results of existing empirical work. We include indicators of physical and social-structural homophily, in addition to symbolic homophily. Results suggest that the optimization values that best replicate existing empirical work include strong variable weightings of kinship, shared worldview, and outgroup suspicion.