Ever been called a social butterfly? Does being popular seem to just come naturally? According to UCSD associate professor of political science James Fowler and Harvard University sociologist Nicholas Christakis, who are studying the impact genes might have on our social networks, popularity may be more natural than you realize.
The pair researches this correlation by examining the social networks of both identical and fraternal twins, based on the scientific belief that identical twins share 100 percent of the genes, while fraternal twins share only about 50 percent.
‘If the social networks of identical twins are more similar to one another than the fraternal twins, then genes might be playing a role in social networks,’ Fowler said.
Data compiled by Add Health, a national representative study of 90,000 adolescents from 140 different schools, was also used to analyze social networks. Each participant was asked to name up to five male and female friends. Within the study, information from 1,000 twins is evaluated, helping Fowler and Christakis speculate how much variation within social networks is due to genes and how much is due to environment.
The use of twin studies, however, has been controversial, according to Evan Balaban, a behavioral neuroscientist from McGill University. In an October 2007 Scientific American magazine article, ‘The Genetics of Politics,’ Balaban warned that the twin method alone is not enough to prove that a concrete connection exists between our genes and our lifestyle and behavior. Because approximately two-thirds of identical twins share the same bloodstream while in utero, similar levels of hormones and other compounds produced by each fetus could lead to similar personality traits.
Hereditary traits, determined by specific genes inherited from both parents, are the focus of Fowler and Christakis’ sociological research. A dominant allele triumphs over a recessive allele, and that trait is reflected in appearance and perhaps even personality.
There are three major components to the stu
dy: the number of times someone is named a friend, the probability that two of your friends will be friends with one another (known as transivity), and how central a person is within a social network, which can be seen as the difference between those standing in the center of a party and those who are wallflowers.
The pair determined that there may be a genetic tendency to introduce friends to one another, and in this way, a person’s genes can have an impact on whether two other people become friends. Additionally, they hypothesized that individuals at the center of social networks are more susceptible to emotional fluctuation or health-related issues such as obesity. Thus, if your friends are happy, you are more likely to be happy, and if your friends are obese you are also more likely to become obese.
Affecting an array of health outcomes, for instance, are certain supergenes, such as Dopamine Serotonin. Fowler suspects that genes like these have such a wide impact on a variety of outcomes because they influence social networks as well.
‘We want to see if social networks are able to explain why some of these health outcomes have a genetic basis and if social networks mediate the relation between genes and health outcomes,’ Fowler said.
A separate, but related, topic to Fowler’s research is the link between genes and political participation and ideology. Genes can affect whether someone votes and that person’s ties to a political party.
‘We come into this world with tendencies for being liberal or not,’ Fowler said. ‘This is controversial. If you take a person out of a rich neighborhood and put them in a poor neighborhood, they will not completely adopt the ideology of the poor neighborhood, proving that environment is not everything.’
According to Fowler, the tendency to be liberal is associated with the Dopamine DrD4 gene, which is connected with experience seeking. This gene, in combination with increased social networks, raises a person’s chance of becoming liberal.
Fowler’s research has been featured in the New York Times, ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘The Colbert Report.’ Currently, Fowler and Christakis are working on a book titled ‘Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives,’ which will be published in 2010.
‘We want to take what we’ve done, and show how it’s relevant in everyday life,’ Fowler said. ‘It is easy for the message to be lost in academic articles.’
Assisting in this endeavor is UCSD graduate student Christopher Dawes, who has been working with Fowler for four years and helped him with papers detailing genes and their impact on political behavior. Dawes said Fowler’s work is unique to contemporary research.
‘I’m not alone in saying that he’s doing some of the most interesting work in any field,’ Dawes said. ‘His work in general has garnered so much attention that people are going to think in terms of health in new ways. It could open up a lot of new possibilities.’
One project Fowler hopes to tackle in the future will use Facebook; he calls his idea the human-nature project. It would involve following different UCSD students on Facebook in order to see if real-life social webs also pertain to virtual networks.
‘For a really long time, we’ve thought about individuals as though they were islands ‘mdash; a Robinson Crusoe model of social science,’ said Fowler in a conversation with physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi published in Seed magazine. ‘Being able to integrate information ‘mdash; not just about people, but abut their relationships ‘mdash; is something that’s completely new.’
Readers can contact Danielle Crawford at [email protected].