Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9833-8338
Date of Award
Spring 2025
Document Type
Thesis (Ph.D.)
Department or Program
Psychological & Brain Sciences
First Advisor
Thalia Wheatley
Abstract
Do the people we interact with shape how we behave and think? Across three aims, we provide evidence that our social environment – the set of people with whom we interact – affects the resiliency of our friendships, the way we think about ourselves, and our well-being. In Aim 1, we investigated the predictors of whether friendships formed within structured study groups persisted after those groups dissolved. Drawing on five cohorts of longitudinal social network data, we tested the relative contributions of individual similarity—across both visible demographic traits and less visible personality characteristics—and the proportion of shared friends between dyad members. Although our hypotheses and initial findings supported personality similarity as a predictor of tie persistence, this effect did not replicate in a larger dataset. Instead, across both datasets, the most consistent and robust predictor of friendship persistence was the proportion of shared friends. In Aim 2, we asked whether conversation partners’ self-views might mutually evolve. Using four-person round-robin conversation networks, we found that participants tended to have more similar self-views post-conversation than pre-conversation, an effect we term “inter-self alignment.” Further, the more two partners’ self-views aligned, the more they enjoyed their conversation and were inclined to interact again. In Aim 3, we provide evidence that social diversity – spending time with different types of conversation partners – predicts greater positive affect and reduced social isolation and that this relationship exists above and beyond the effects of time spent in conversation, time spent with close others, and experiential diversity. We also identified personality-based predictors of social diversity, finding that emotional stability was predictive of social diversity during the COVID pandemic, but that extraversion was the strongest predictor after the pandemic. We also found that the relationship between social diversity and well-being was mediated by participants' perceptions of their personal social networks’ expansiveness. All together, we demonstrate that the people who surround us profoundly mold our behavior and psychology.
Original Citation
Welker, C., Wheatley, T., Cason, G., Gorman, C., & Meyer, M. (2024). Self-views converge during enjoyable conversations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(43), e2321652121.
Recommended Citation
Welker, Christopher, "EXISTING IN CONTEXT: THE EFFECT OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT ON INDIVIDUALS' FRIENDSHIPS, BELIEFS, AND WELL-BEING" (2025). Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations. 356.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dissertations/356
