What to blame my anti-social behaviour on

How well you make friends obviously depends to some degree on heritable personality traits such as whether you are gregarious or shy.

But in a paper published in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday, researchers at the University of California San Diego and Harvard Medical School say heredity also strongly influences whether your friends know each other, and it helps determine your standing in social networks.

“Basically, we think there's a gene that causes some people to be more likely to introduce one friend to other friends, with the result being that some people create denser clusters of social networks around them than others do,” said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard.

Source: SignOnSanDiego