Social networking influenced by genes

BOSTON, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- For those unhappy with their popularity on Facebook, U.S. researchers suggest that social networking is influenced by genetics.

Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and Christopher Dawes and James Fowler, both of the University of California, San Diego, said they were able to show that a person's particular location in vast social networks have a genetic basis.

"In fact, the beautiful and complicated pattern of human connection depends on our genes to a significant measure," Christakis said in a statement.

The researchers found that popularity, or the number of times an individual was named as a friend, and the likelihood that those friends know one another, were both strongly heritable.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that location within the network, or the tendency to be at the center or on the edges of the group, was also genetically linked. However, the researchers were surprised to learn that the number of people named as a friend by an individual did not appear to be inherited.

The researchers used national data of 1,110 adolescent twins, both fraternal and identical. The researchers compared the social networks of the identical twins to those of the fraternal twins, and found greater similarity between the identical twins' social network structure than the fraternal twins' networks.