Genes affect on Social Networks

Piccolinno has a good post up at Gene Expression. Let me grab a long quote.

Heritability estimates are slippery animals, but this recent PNAS paper is a great illustration of how they can be used to discipline theories of social network formation. The authors start by showing that three building blocks of social networks are heritable, namely the number of friends you have, the number of people who name you as a friend, and the likelihood that two of your friends are also friends. They then ask if existing theories of social network formation are consistent with empirical fact that a large share of individual variation in these buildling blocks is explained by individual characteristics. Perhaps not too surprisingly to readers of this blog, a model which allows individuals to differ ex ante does considerably better than models which make a blank slate assumption.