Displaying Things in Common to Encourage Friendship Formation: A Large Randomized Field Experiment
Friendship formation is important to online social network sites and to society, but can suffer from informational friction. In this study, we demonstrate that social networks may effectively use an IT-facilitated intervention -- displaying things in common (TIC) between users (mutual hometown, inte...
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Main Authors | , |
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Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
07.05.2019
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Friendship formation is important to online social network sites and to
society, but can suffer from informational friction. In this study, we
demonstrate that social networks may effectively use an IT-facilitated
intervention -- displaying things in common (TIC) between users (mutual
hometown, interest, education, work, city) -- to encourage friendship
formation. Displaying TIC updates an individual's belief about the shared
similarity with another and reduces information friction that may be hard to
overcome in offline communication. In collaboration with an online social
network, we conduct a randomized field experiment that randomly varies the
prominence of different things in common when a user is browsing a non-friend's
profile. The dyad-level exogenous variation, orthogonal to any (un)observed
structural factors in viewer-profile's network, allows us to cleanly isolate
the role of preferences for TIC in driving network formation and homophily. We
find that displaying TICs to viewers can significantly increase their
probability of sending a friend requests and forming friendships, and is
especially effective for pairs of people who have little in common. We also
find that displaying TIC can improve friendship formation for a wide range of
viewers with different demographics and is more effective when the TICs are
more surprising to the viewer. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.1905.02762 |