Friends tend to behave alike. That may not sound like a startling conclusion, but why they do so is not so easy to understand. In quest of an answer, University of Michigan researchers surveyed users of Second Life, the virtual reality Website, with regard to their adoption of gestures. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing or waving.

Gestures are available for purchase in Second Life. About half the gestures acquired by participants were purchased; the other half were passed along from friend to friend and can be used as is or modified, depending on the originator’s wishes. Because Second Life lists the previous owner of a gesture, the study was able to determine that gestures were adopted among people who were already friends.

“In Second Life, you can trace these transfers. In real life, there are studies that suggest this is the case, but it’s hard to separate whether people are like individuals, or they’re exchanging gestures because they are friends,” said Lada Adamic, assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at U of M.

The survey also found that early adopters are not the same as influencers. “We looked for individuals who had more than 20 gestures and were in the first 5 percent of adopters for of all of them,” said Adamic, describing the process of identifying early adopters. The group of people who were most likely to pass along gestures to others did not overlap with the early adopters, the study found.

Using data from Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the researchers studied 130 days' worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009, looking at  100,229 users and 106,499 gestures. The paper is titled “Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content” and was funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper will be delivered July 10, 2009, by Eytan Bakshy at the Association for Computer Machinery’s Conference on Electronic Commerce at Stanford University.