While race can affect many aspects of daily life, it is not the main factor in forming friendships.
This is according to a recent Harvard-UCLA study, which suggests the assumed racial preference in friend choice is actually due to aspects such as shared ethnic background or the social pressure to return a friendly gesture.
“If you don’t have fine grain data, you overestimate the importance of race,” said Andreas Wimmer, a UCLA sociology professor and the lead author of the study.
Additional factors influencing friendship choices include the tendency to form relationships through mutual friends, similar socioeconomic status and majors.
The results were based on a four-year study conducted by Wimmer and Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student in sociology . To reach a relevant and diverse subject group, the researchers collected data via Facebook.
After approaching Facebook for permission to collect data through its website, Wimmer and Lewis gained default access to the network of an undisclosed university with a high rate of participation. The researchers then narrowed their subject pool to the university’s freshmen, and sifted through the public profiles and photo albums of 740 students, tracking the progress of their college lives.
Instead of relying on the “friending” option of the site, Lewis said he and Wimmer evaluated friendships based on posted and tagged photos of friends.
“The existence of Facebook allows us to study how people relate to each other,” Wimmer said.
The researchers also collected information such as movie and book preferences, home state and major. Initially, they found that students of similar racial backgrounds befriended each other more frequently than members of other races, an insight that had been determined in past sociological studies.
However, after further analysis, researchers realized that same-race preference is actually an inclination toward students of the same ethnicity.
“If you go out and ask people what race they are, (you see that) Asians hang out with each other,” Lewis said. “By looking at a more fine-grained level, we were able to identify that it’s not just that Asians hang out with each other, but Japanese students hang out with Japanese students and Chinese students with Chinese students. It provides a more accurate explanation of what’s going on.”
However, some ethnic groups may value race more strongly than others. While Lewis said Asians, whites and people of mixed backgrounds did not rely as much on race, blacks and Latinos befriended each other more frequently. Regardless, Wimmer said the study was “good news” in terms of the reasons behind friendship development.
“It shows that putting people together in the same environment is more important than race at times,” Wimmer said.