Bangalore:  A recent study conducted by Harvard University shows that the people are less influenced by the interest and “likes” of other people and friends on social networks.

The study on facebook habits of a group of 200 students for a time period of 4 years named “Social selection and peer influence in an online social network”  by three sociologists Jason Kaufrman, Kevin Lewis and Marco Gonzales was published this week.

It analyzed the characters of students including music tastes, likes, friends and the place of living. The students represented as nodes with lines between them as friendship and a particular color given to the nodes/ students who's likes are similar, say jazz/classical artists and the node size is proportional to the quantity of the artists that he lists. The study shows that different people who share common tastes in movies and music,  not books are likely to befriend one other, rather than trying to adopt the likes and characters of the current friends.

But what the researchers were trying to know was if ‘the act of friending’ cause the people to change themselves based on others or would they like to continue on the same grounds and the result was in favor of the latter. The release of study at this time favors face book’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he was warned about the risk of being sued by any person in the network over the “like” button. A judge in San Francisco rejected a case against face book by the users saying that they were ‘economically injured’ by the use of “like” button for the advertisement of companies.

 Even though the study was conducted on a small group, it provided a short insight into the social evolution and social selection of the present population and the factors affecting it.