SocBond – the mechanisms and behaviours that create friendship

Friendship is a bidirectional affiliative bond that helps people live longer healthier lives, while loneliness is linked to poor physical and mental health. SocBond is a large-scale investigation of the brain, behavioural and cognitive mechanisms that build social connections. Studies of whether two people will become friends suggest that synchrony (moving together), homophily (similarity of culture and cognition), and task (opportunities to coordinate and share ideas) are the three strongest factors predicting affiliation. We bring these together in the SyncShareBond model where task and homophily create conditions that allow people to synchronise brain and behaviour when they meet and this synchrony builds affiliations. SocBond will test this with experimental studies of affiliation in small groups (4 people with fNIRS brain imaging) and large groups (10-30 people with motion and heart-rate sensors). Research Question 1 asks How does synchrony create affiliation? Multimodal recordings of brain, behavioural and physiological synchrony in small groups of participants doing a variety of tasks will reveal what causes affiliation and thus define the cognitive mechanisms of social bonding. RQ2 asks What methods best model synchrony? and will use cutting-edge analysis methods from different domains to answer our questions. RQ3 asks Do cognitive differences and homophily impact social bonding? Using large-group studies with measures of social skills in each person, we will test if some people find it hard to make friends and if being in a homophily-group can help. RQ4 asks How does friendship develop over time? Tracking synchrony in cohorts who meet regularly over 8 months with additional brain imaging will reveal the dynamics of friendship formation and the neural mechanisms that underlie this. Overall, SocBond is a novel detailed examination of the mechanisms of affiliation with broad implications for reducing loneliness and improving human wellbeing.