Working with Friends: Unveiling Working Affinity Features from Facebook Data

Abstract

College students often have to team up for classprojects, and they select each other based not only onpast performance (e.g., grades) but also on whetherthey get along (e.g., whether they trust each other).There has not been any study on the relationshipbetween team formation for class projects and socialmedia. To fix that, we ask a group of university studentsto tell us with whom they wish to work, gather theironline Facebook data, and test the predictors of teamformation. We find that self-organized selection ofteam members does not strongly depend on pastgrades but rather on Facebook-derived proxies fortie strength, popularity, and homophily. These resultshave important theoretical implications for the teamformation literature and practical implications foronline educational platforms.