•Enhances the empirical literature on the relationship between social interaction and the transmission of investment ideas.•Empirical support for the social transmission explanation to the active investment puzzle recently proposed in Han and Hirshleifer (wp, 2012).•New proxies for active portfolio management are introduced.•Demonstrates the potential to use a publicly available, representative household dataset in the finance discipline. This research provides empirical evidence that social interaction is more prevalent among active rather than passive investors. While previous empirical work, spearheaded by Hong et al. (2004), shows that proxies for sociability are related to participation in asset markets, the literature is unable to distinguish between the types of participants because of data limitations. I address this shortcoming by using data from the Consumer Expenditure Quarterly Interview Survey, which contains information on individual holdings and the buying and selling of financial assets, as well as expenditure variables that imply variation in the level of social activity. This finding supports a new explanation for the active-investing puzzle in which informal communication tends to promote active rather than passive strategies (Han and Hirshleifer, 2012).