Journal Article

Proximity can induce diverse friendships: A large randomized classroom experiment

Elwert, Felix, Rohrer, Julia M., Keller, Tamás

2021

Overview

Can outside interventions foster socio-culturally diverse friendships? We executed a large field experiment that randomized the seating charts of 182 3 rd through 8 th grade classrooms ( N = 2,966 students) for the duration of one semester. We found that being seated next to each other increased the probability of a mutual friendship from 15% to 22% on average. Furthermore, induced proximity increased the latent propensity toward friendship equally for all students, regardless of students’ dyadic similarity with respect to educational achievement, gender, and ethnicity. However, the probability of a manifest friendship increased more among similar than among dissimilar students—a pattern mainly driven by gender. Our findings demonstrate that a scalable light-touch intervention can affect face-to-face networks and foster diverse friendships in groups that already know each other, but they also highlight that transgressing boundaries, especially those defined by gender, remains an uphill battle.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Classrooms / College students / Colleges & universities / Computer and Information Sciences / Distances / Educational aspects / Elementary schools / Ethnicity / Experiments / Friendship / Gender / Health behavior / Hypotheses / Measurement / Minority & ethnic groups / Multiculturalism & pluralism / Nominations / People and Places / Science Policy / Social aspects / Social networks / Social Sciences / Students