It's no surprise that there's a gene in congeniality. Apparently, how easy you make friends obviously depends to some degree on heritable personality traits such as whether you are gregarious or shy.

 

A paper published in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday by researchers at the University of California San Diego and Harvard Medical School says that heredity also strongly influences whether your friends know each other, and it helps determine where you stand in social networks. In other words, scientists have come to the conclusion that an individual's genetic makeup can influence the behavior of others too. For instance, one person’s genes can influence the probability that two of that person’s friends will eventually become friends of each other.

 

A new study comparing the two types of twins, identical and fraternal, shows that genetics might affect social behavior. They found greater similarity between the social networks of identical twins, who share the exact same genes, than those of fraternal twins, whose genes might be slightly different.

 

Last year, scientists Fowler and Christakis published a paper explaining the fact that traits such as happiness and obesity can spread like a virus from one person to another. For example, if one or many of your friends put on weight, there are big chances for you to do the same. Likewise, the researchers found it is easier to quit smoking if people around you are doing the same thing or not smoking at all.

 

The conclusion is simple: some people are the life of the party, naturally drawing attention upon them-selves while others are trying to be as invisible as possible. To a significant, measurable degree, studies find that genetics is able to put each of them in a certain categories.