What determines who becomes and stays friends? It might be all in your head

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-08-04 19:00

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Photo by Felipe Bustillo on Unsplash

What determines who becomes and stays friends? It might have something to do with how our brains react to the world around us, according to international research, which found that people who have similar brain activity when watching a movie are more likely to be friends eight months later. The researchers used an MRI machine to study the brain patterns of 43 incoming graduate students who would be studying the same graduate program while they watched a series of videos, and then surveyed the students two and eight months later to analyse how their social networks had developed. The results indicated that students who ended up becoming friends in the graduate program had greater pre-existing similarity in their brain's reactions to the videos than those who did not become close.

Journal/
conference: Nature Human Behaviour

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of California, USA

Funder: This work was supported by startup funds from UCLA, National Institute of Mental Health grant no. R01MH128720 (C.P.) and National Science Foundation grant no. 1835239 (C.P.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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