ArticlePloS one2017
Formation of homophily in academic performance: Students change their friends rather than performance.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 23 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 81 citations in OpenAlex.
- Eliciting the views of autistic adolescents attending specialist schools on what friendships mean to them.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2026Article
- Homophily within and across groups.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Children's social preference for teachers versus peers in autism inclusion classrooms: An objective perspective.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Article
- Quantifying the impact of homophily and influencer networks on song popularity prediction.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Academic Success at Social Costs: An Exploratory Study on Social Networks of Chinese Students under Academic Streaming.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2024Article
- Reciprocal longitudinal effects between sense of school belonging and academic achievement: quasi-experimental estimates using United States primary school data.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Stability of the personal relationship networks in a longitudinal study of middle school students.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Academic performance and social networks of adolescents in a caribbean city in Colombia.BMC psychology · 2023Article
- Polarization in COVID-19 Vaccine Discussion Networks.American politics research · 2023Article
- Objective quantification of homophily in children with and without disabilities in naturalistic contexts.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Empirical social triad statistics can be explained with dyadic homophylic interactions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Social contagion of academic behavior: Comparing social networks of close friends and admired peers.PloS one · 2022Article
- The Structure of Social Networks and Its Link to Higher Education Students' Socio-Emotional Loneliness During COVID-19.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Article
- The University as a Source of Social Capital in Chile.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- No evidence for a relationship between social closeness and similarity in resting-state functional brain connectivity in schoolchildren.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Herding Friends in Similarity-Based Architecture of Social Networks.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- How academic achievement spreads: The role of distinct social networks in academic performance diffusion.PloS one · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Homophily, the tendency of individuals to associate with others who share similar traits, has been identified as a major driving force in the formation and evolution of social ties. In many cases, it is not clear if homophily is the result of a socialization process, where individuals change their traits according to the dominance of that trait in their local social networks, or if it results from a selection process, in which individuals reshape their social networks so that their traits match those in the new environment. Here we demonstrate the detailed temporal formation of strong homophily in academic achievements of high school and university students. We analyze a unique dataset that contains information about the detailed time evolution of a friendship network of 6,000 students across 42 months. Combining the evolving social network data with the time series of the academic performance (GPA) of individual students, we show that academic homophily is a result of selection: students prefer to gradually reorganize their social networks according to their performance levels, rather than adapting their performance to the level of their local group. We find no signs for a pull effect, where a social environment of good performers motivates bad students to improve their performance. We are able to understand the underlying dynamics of grades and networks with a simple model. The lack of a social pull effect in classical educational settings could have important implications for the understanding of the observed persistence of segregation, inequality and social immobility in societies.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.