Conversation is a primary means of social influence, but its effects on brain activity remain unknown. Previous work on conversation and social influence has emphasized public compliance, largely setting private beliefs aside. Here, we show that consensus-building conversation aligns future brain activity within groups, with alignment persisting through novel experiences participants did not discuss.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCultural outsiders, like immigrants or international students, often struggle to make friends. We propose that one barrier to social connection is not knowing what it means to be socially competent in the host culture. First-year students at a U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman behavior is embedded in social networks. Certain characteristics of the positions that people occupy within these networks appear to be stable within individuals. Such traits likely stem in part from individual differences in how people tend to think and behave, which may be driven by individual differences in the neuroanatomy supporting socio-affective processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMigration and mobility increase the cultural diversity of a society. Does this diversity have consequences for how people interact and form social ties, even when they join a new community? We hypothesized that people from regions with greater cultural diversity would forge more diversified social ties in a newly formed community, connecting otherwise unconnected groups. In other words, they would become .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHomophily is a prevalent characteristic of human social networks: individuals tend to associate and bond with others who are similar to themselves with respect to physical traits and demographic attributes, such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging has demonstrated a positive relationship between individuals' real-world social network proximity (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis research demonstrates that linguistic similarity predicts network-tie formation and that friends exhibit linguistic convergence over time. In Study 1, we analyzed the linguistic styles and the emerging social network of a complete cohort of 285 students. In Study 2, we analyzed a large-scale data set of online reviews.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing the emergent friendship network of an incoming cohort of students in an M.B.A.
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