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THURSDAY, Sept. 2 (HealthDay News) -- When it comes to online social networking, people are more likely to change habits that might affect their health when encouraged to do so by cyber conversations with friends they already know well and with whom they are in close contact, new research suggests.
The finding runs contrary to prior indications that health information gleaned from close-knit online social networks is actually less likely to drive behavioral change, given the likelihood that groups of people who are in frequent contact with each other are likely to exchange repetitive and redundant advice.
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This thinking, in turn, has given rise to the notion that behavior is more likely to change quickly as a result of advice culled from so-called "long-tie" relationships, namely, online social networks involving people who live far apart and maintain contact less often.
"It's startling to see that this is not always the case," study author Damon Centola, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Mass., said in an MIT news release.
Centola's observations are published in the Sept. 3 issue of Science.
After running a series of social networking experiments involving more than 1,500 participants, Centola found that the redundancies and repetitiveness that characterizes interactions among close groups of friends is actually a central driving force behind encouraging people to change their health behaviors.
"Social reinforcement from multiple health buddies made participants much more willing to adopt the behavior," he wrote in the report.
Centola's experiments revolved around matching up the participants -- all of whom were anonymously enrolled in an Internet-based health interests community -- according to shared health concerns.
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