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Cited by 542

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 60 of the 60 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Social selection and peer influence in an online social network

Open access
Lewis, Kevin, Gonzalez, Marco, Kaufman, Jason·2012·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Disentangling the effects of selection and influence is one of social science's greatest unsolved puzzles: Do people befriend others who are similar to them, or do they become more similar to their friends over time? Recent advances in stochastic actor-based modeling, combined with self-reported data on a popular online social network site, allow us to address this question with a greater degree of precision than has heretofore been possible. Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends—except for tastes in classical/jazz music. These findings shed light on the mechanisms responsible for observed network homogeneity; provide a statistically rigorous assessment of the coevolution of cultural tastes and social relationships; and suggest important qualifications to our understanding of both homophily and contagion as generic social processes.

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Metadata

Authors
Lewis, K., Gonzalez, M., & Kaufman, J.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2011-12-19
Volume
109
Issue
1
Pages
68-72
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W1969667322
Cited by
542
References
60
FWCI
24.64
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Social selection and peer influence in an online social network. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1109739109
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Lewis, K., Gonzalez, M., & Kaufman, J. (2012). Social selection and peer influence in an online social network. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1109739109

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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