A new study analyses how we choose friends at school

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - Similarity is not the key, according to this research which UC3M is taking part in Researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and Loyola University have discovered that personality does not seem to have much influence when it comes to choosing social friendships at school, which are based more on the closeness of our contacts, according to a study recently published in the journal PNAS. "This is pioneering work in the sense that it uses machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to predict whether there is a relationship (good or bad) between two people. But beyond this prediction itself, the work provides an understanding of how we build our friendships, by identifying common relationships and not personal characteristics as the main reason for being connected," says one of the study's authors, Anxo Sánchez, a professor in UC3M's Department of Mathematics and a researcher in the Complex Systems Interdisciplinary Group (GISC, in its Spanish acronym). This work, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), presents a detailed study of the social relationships of students at 13 secondary schools, including more than 3,000 students and around 60,000 reported positive and negative relationships, along with evidence of students' personal traits. "We can predict quite accurately (90%) whether two people are friends or if they do not get on simply by knowing how many friends and enemies they have in common," adds Anxo Sánchez.