There is an old adage that says “Birds of a feather flock together”. It commonly is used to illustrate that people that behave and think similarly tend to act and talk with one another. It’s likely a reason why people try to use the concept of guilt by association.

While it is true that people do like to act and talk with one another if they behave and think similarly, some people will behave and act together because of other reasons. They may be doing something like playing a game or talking about their differences or various other things that have nothing to do with their behaviors and things they believe.

I’d like to focus however on the commonality portion of the subject matter.

Things that people do or believe are traits associated with those people. In physics there is a concept called resonance.

In physics, resonance is a phenomenon in which a vibrating system or external force drives another system to oscillate with greater amplitude at specific frequencies. – Wikipedia

The vibration of an object in physics is analogous to traits when it comes to thinking creatures such as humans.

When you have a group of people get together, their traits will all start to swing towards one another to become more similar. The strongest willed people in the group will have other people’s traits swing more in their direction if the traits are within the traits range.

With vibration of objects in physics you will have things within a similar frequency (vibration) range start to sync up. The object with the strongest source of vibration will feed the other objects vibrating and make them more align with its vibration frequency.

This happens with many things and I’ve named it trait resonance.

You can see this with language and cultures as well. With cultures, people call it assimilation. They become more like the bigger culture than the bigger culture becomes like the smaller culture. The strength of the traits from the bigger culture is larger and so will move the traits from the bigger culture to the smaller culture. This is only if the traits of the cultures are expressed with the same authority from each culture from each individual.

If you have a small culture that is very authoritarian with their expression of their traits and the larger culture is not very authoritarian but is instead accepting of other cultures, the smaller culture may over take the bigger culture with their traits.

You can look at viruses and bacteria to also see a similar effect. If the virus is weak but infects a small host it can do serious damage to the host. If the viruses weak but infects a large host the large host may not even notice that the virus ever entered its system. If the virus is very strong and the host is just of normal strength then the virus can destroy the host. It’s a combination of quantity of entities carrying a trait and the strength of the trait expression. (entities*trait expression=trait expression total)

This becomes interesting when you look at language and how that works out. If you have a language in the north part of a country and a different one in the south part of the country you will end up with a mix in the middle of at least the accents. A more dominant accent however will overshadow the lesser dominant accents when expressed through verbal language expression.

The bonding of people through traits is a side effect of trait resonance which can be termed trait magnetism. A person will express their own traits and others that are similar enough will fit up through trait resonance. An object will resonate with vibration of their own and other objects with similar enough resonate frequencies will fit up through resonance.