Personality and Social Network Composition: The Case of Openness to Other

• In Event: 1-217 - Intergroup Friendships in Cultural Context: Harnessing the Power of Social Network Approaches

Integrative Statement

As people change, so do their social networks (Offer & Fischer, 2018). Yet, network properties may remain stable across new environments. Homophily—associating with similar others—describes most social networks (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001), but only on average. A personality perspective suggests that individuals vary in their degree of homophily, and they do. Researchers have tried to explain this variation using demographic factors (Blau, 1977), but variation remains unexplained. Personality has been linked to prejudice and important social outcomes (McCrae, 1996), making it a potentially useful tool to understand individual differences in homophily. Here, we test the hypothesis that the personality trait Openness to Experience and its interpersonal facet Openness to Other predict lower levels of ethnic homophily during three periods of network development and replicate effects across three studies (total N = 1223).
Participants nominated members of their personal networks for three periods of network development: friends from before college (past, stable network), friends at college (current, stable network), and new acquaintances at college (current, emerging network). Figure 1 shows the basic design. From these nominations we coded our dependent variable, whether the network members’ ethnicity differed from the participant’s (= 1) or not (= 0). Global Openness to Experience was assessed using the BFI-2 (Soto & John, 2017ab). The more specific facet Openness to Other (O2)—defined as people’s appreciation, embrace of, and preference for others who are different—was assessed with a ten-item scale (Antonoplis, Mauskopf, Mendoza-Denton, & John, in prep).
On average, participants’ networks contained about two-thirds same-ethnicity members. This average level of homophily changed, however, after students transitioned to college. The pre-college network was the least diverse (72% same-ethnicity); the stable college network, next (65%); and the emerging college network, the most (57%). Within each of these three networks, Openness and O2 both predicted greater ethnic diversity. Figure 2 illustrates this effect for the total network in Study 2: Individuals low on O2 had 2.68 times as many same- as different-ethnicity network members, and those high on O2, 1.16. This pattern held not only in the total network but also for all three periods of network development. Critically, this effect held even when controlling for participants’ ethnicity, their other personality traits, and their past social network composition. In addition, upon entering the more diverse college environment, higher O2 individuals were more prepared to take advantage of this new affordance. They had more diverse college networks than those lower O2 individuals with equally diverse pre-college networks. Extending these results, we found that individuals lower on O2 regarded their different-ethnicity network members as less personally important than their same-ethnicity members, whereas those higher on O2 did not.
This work sheds new light on how personal networks develop with changes in environmental affordances but do so in a way that is shaped by personality, thus identifying factors relevant to the development and maintenance of intergroup contact. Future work should examine the dynamics of network construction—how individuals select, and are selected into, social networks.

Authors

• Stephen Antonoplis, UC Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Oliver P John, UC Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author