Even people who have hundreds of Facebook or LinkedIn connections are likely to only interact online with the same crowd of like-minded users, according to MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Damon Centola. On the bright side, Centola told The Standard, cliquishness can actually be good for the world.

Centola and a team of physicists from Mallorca, Spain, used a computer model to simulate online social interaction among 40,000 virtual individuals. The model introduced occasional cultural exchanges -- "random noise" -- to keep individuals circulating as they would in a real online community, but at the population level, the study found that just as in the face-to-face world, individuals still "form into tightly clustered cultural cliques," tending to "look alike," having the same politics, types of jobs and tastes in music. The study confirms others done on behavior in Internet communities, Centola said, including one based on LiveJournal.

Cliques do have their dark sides, Centola concedes, but said his study did not measure the effect of, say, one group oppressing another. In general, homophily -- the principal of "likes attract" -- is desirable because it preserves valuable cultural differences no reasonable person would want to see obliterated.

"Exchanges are obviously culturally valuable. We can integrate them into our background. But our findings show that stable cultural groups prevent these exchanges from eliminating differences, which could produce a homogenous world where everyone listens to the same music and believes in the same things," said Centola. "By preserving differences, it allows for new cultural possibilities to emerge... [like] the green movement, for instance."

So while cliques might have been an oppressive force in high school for many, their online equivalents have an opportunity to accomplish much more.