Perception of individual traits, age, and teaching modality drive social networks among students

People perceive, interpret, and assess others’ behaviors to build social ties even at young ages, affected by local contexts, which can lead, in the end, to improving learning experiences, resolving complex tasks, or creating companies. After the recent healthcare crisis due to COVID-19, online and hybrid social interactions are more prevalent in current social relationships and particularly relevant in education because information communication technologies now modulate behaviors. Here, we explore the role of social behaviors and their local contexts in building social networks and driving individual network centrality. Chilean education configuration provides a natural setting for exploring social relationships because students remain in the same group eight hours per day during their entire primary (eight years) and secondary (four years) school years. Thus, in the social mix of the classroom, students would show and witness their and others’ behaviors in both academic and social activities. We conduct two studies in different educational levels: i) primary school students (858 students from 45 different classrooms) and ii) secondary (191 students from eight different classrooms) to test cognitive and social drivers for network centrality. In the first study, we map the network collaboration for 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade students. We find that 3rd-grade students exhibit more connections in their social networks than older students. Besides, we observe that social perception of popularity, prosociality, aggressiveness, and social preferences drive network centrality. In the second study, we separated secondary students into two different local contexts: hybrid and online teaching modalities. We find that students exhibit more network connectivity in the hybrid setting, and good student perception does not drive individual network centrality. On the other hand, in classrooms performing online teaching, the perception of good students is positively associated with network centrality. These results support the idea that students behave by following and interpreting social behaviors in their interactions, even in young populations. The availability and use of information for tie formation are dependable on students’ cognitive maturity and accessibility to face-to-face interactions, where popularity and pro-social behavior, for instance, become more evident.