Abstract
Personality affects dyadic relations and teamwork, yet its role among groups of friends has been little explored. We examine for the first time whether similarity in personality enhances the effectiveness of real-life friendship groups. Using data from a longitudinal study of a European fraternity (10 male and 15 female groups), we investigate how individual Big Five personality traits were associated with group formation and whether personality homophily related to how successful the groups were over 1 year (N = 147–196). Group success was measured as group performance/identification (adoption of group markers) and as group bonding (using the inclusion-of-other-in-self scale). Results show that individuals’ similarity in neuroticism and conscientiousness predicted group formation. Furthermore, personality similarity was associated with group success, even after controlling for individual’s own personality. Especially higher group-level similarity in conscientiousness was associated with group performance, and with bonding in male groups.
Highlights
Social relations with peers are essential for survival, health and well-being (Caccioppo, 2008; DavidBarrett and Dunbar, 2017) and the challenge of choosing friends and maintaining relations with them is one of our main social tasks today (Pearce, 2014)
We investigate two research questions: (1) Do individuals in our sample tend to cluster in friendship groups around some personality traits, exhibiting homophily in group formation? We predict that personality homophily will affect group formation, so that individuals will prefer to team up with individuals who are similar to them in personality (H1)
Conscientiousness and neuroticism, were statistically significantly associated with group formation
Summary
Social relations with peers are essential for survival, health and well-being (Caccioppo, 2008; DavidBarrett and Dunbar, 2017) and the challenge of choosing friends and maintaining relations with them is one of our main social tasks today (Pearce, 2014). Every respondent was assigned one individual value for each personality trait, five values in total This second type of analysis was done with robust regression methods using heteroscedasticity adjustments for error terms (HC2 and HC3; where appropriate) (see Table 3 and Figures 3, 4 below); different adjustments did not alter the main results they somewhat reduced statistical significance. This creates a measure of homogeneity for the individual with respect to his/her group members, and allows us to simplify the regression models by excluding group level clustering from our model. Group success was assessed in three ways, as group performance/identification, as group bonding and as group size
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