Technology Blog

Do friends wear the same clothes or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, part of the reason they became friends or, once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?  Social scientists don't know for sure and are still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn't keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.  But the virtual world of "Second Life" does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have tried to use this information to study how "gestures" make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting. read more

"We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets," said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
"There's been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds," Adamic said. "We're not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance."
"In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena," Bakshy said. "While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence."