Facebook Study Finds Race Trumped by Ethnic, Social, Geographic Origins in Forging Friendships
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…)