COLUMBUS, Ohio – Just a few minutes of listening to mainstream rock music was enough to influence white college students to favor a student group catering mostly to whites over groups serving other ethnic and racial groups, a new study found.
However, white students who listened to more ethnically diverse Top 40 pop music showed equal support for groups focused on whites, African Americans, Arab Americans and Latino Americans. (more…)
Harvard graduate Kevin Lewis (left) and UCLA sociologist Andreas Wimmer are co-authors of a new Facebook study on how college students form friendships. Image credit: Luis Gomez
Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who buddies up with whom, suggests a new UCLA–Harvard University study of American college students on the social networking site Facebook.
“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” said Andreas Wimmer, the study’s lead author and a sociologist at UCLA. “But we’ve found that birds of a feather don’t always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide stronger grounds for forging friendships than a shared racial background.”
“We’ve been able to show that just because two people of the same racial background are hanging out together, it’s not necessarily because they share the same racial background,” said co-author Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student in sociology. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Old memories die hard. Simply reminding college students of the O.J. Simpson trial can alter the quality of their working relationships, according to University of Michigan research.
