ArticleNature communications2018
Similar neural responses predict friendship.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 131 papers.
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Who cites it
131 citing papers in PubMed.
- Examining emotion reactivity to politically polarizing media in a randomized controlled trial of mindfulness training versus active coping training.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Experience-dependent changes in functional connectome fingerprinting.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Dyadic Person Similarity Predicts Similarity in Face Judgements.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Towards naturalistic social neuroscience: A multi-level framework integrating real-world phenotyping, neurobiology, and computational mechanisms.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Finding agreement: Functional magnetic resonance imaging hyperscanning reveals that mental state space exploration facilitates opinion alignment.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2026Article
- Inter-subject correlations and their behavioral associations vary across movies: Implications for generalizability.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Affiliation in human-AI interactions is based on shared psychological traits.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Social compatibility in opposite-sex prairie vole pairs is modulated by early-life sleep experience.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The roles of emotional responding and regulation in adolescent friendship stability: A multimethod functional magnetic resonance imaging study.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2026Article
- Reduced inter-subject functional connectivity during movies in autism: replicability across cross-national fMRI datasets.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Social closeness and reward sensitivity enhance corticostriatal function during experiences of shared rewards.Biological psychology · 2026Article
- Parsing Interactive Social Cognition: Mentalizing Accuracy and Propensity in Dyadic Contexts.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Making new connections: an fNIRS machine learning classification study of inter-brain synchrony in the default mode network.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- I sync, therefore I am: brain-body synchrony in typical and disordered consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Review
- Beyond the dichotomy between controlled and naturalistic paradigms: modeling psychological constructs in cognitive neuroscience.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- A developmental framework of interpersonal neural synchrony.Developmental review : DR · 2025Article
- Learning with others: teacher-learner brain synchrony depends on mutual gaze and joint attention.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Green urban environments enhance brain-to-brain synchrony.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural similarity predicts whether strangers become friends.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Neural predictors of hidden, persistent psychological states at work.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
71 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects' brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity decreases with increasing distance in a real-world social network. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction.
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Registered trials
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.