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Full-Text Articles in Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms
Similar Neural Responses Predict Friendship, Carolyn Parkinson, Adam M. Kleinbaum, Thalia Wheatley
Similar Neural Responses Predict Friendship, Carolyn Parkinson, Adam M. Kleinbaum, Thalia Wheatley
Dartmouth Scholarship
Human 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). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects’ brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity …