TUILES: Tuesday Informal Lunchtime Seminars Spring 2015
Tuesday, March 24th
KMC 8-170
Lunch will be available at 12:15 pm. The seminar begins at 12:30 pm.
"Personality, Homophily and Embeddedness"
Samuel Fraiberger and Arun Sundararajan
We will provide some evidence we have gathered about population-scale homophily in personality traits. The analysis presented is based on data collected from a subset of 2.1 million volunteers who took a five-factor personality test and provided us access to their Facebook profiles. Our results establish assortative mixing across pairs of friends in each of the “big Five” personality traits – agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion and openness – although the measured level of similarity varies across trait, and is sometimes weaker when accounting for variation in network degree across individuals. We will discuss how pairs of friends that belong to the same school or workplace display different levels of trait homophily than friends from across the population in general, and discuss how this might affect the generalizability of findings from studies based on samples from a single institution. We will also discuss differences we observe in same gender and cross gender friendships, and across male-male and female-female friendships. We will seek your input into interpreting preliminary results we have on how the observed gap in homophily between friend and non-friend pairs grows with network embeddedness, and whether this supports a theory of individuals accepting or rejecting friendship formation opportunities created by shared friends based on perceived trait similarity.
* Joint work with Carlos Herrera and Antonio Prada