Neural Homophily: Similar Neural Responses Predict Friendship

Abstract

We resemble our friends on a wide range of dimensions (e.g., age, gender), but do similarities between friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To find out, we characterized the social network of a cohort of 279 students, a subset of whom participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study involving free-viewing of video stimuli. We compared fMRI response time series between corresponding brain regions across pairs of individuals and found that neural response similarity decreased with increasing distance in the social network. These effects persisted after controlling for demographic similarity. Further, it was possible to accurately classify the distance between individuals in their social network based on the similarity of their fMRI response time series across brain regions. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and react to the world around us.