Varied friends are the spice of life

If many of your friends are similar to you in age, ethnicity, educational background, and income, you certainly aren't alone. "Human beings show a preference for interacting with similar others," note the University of Birmingham's Miguel R. Ramos and colleagues in a new paper in Psychological Science. This tendency, known as homophily, is thought to help the formation of tight social networks.

However, studies also show that many of us feel a drive to connect with different kinds of people, too. This drive could in theory give us access to new resources, experiences, and opportunities to collaborate with others, conveying a number of social benefits.

Given these two contrasting drives, the team wondered what type of friendship mix might maximise our wellbeing. To explore this, they analysed nationally representative data on the health, social lives, and various attitudes of 24,726 adults based throughout England.

These participants had reported on what proportion of their friends were of the same race, age bracket, educational bracket, and income level. The researchers gave those for whom less than half of their friends fell into a given category a low score for homophily, while those who reported that all their friends 'were the same' as them got a high score.

To measure wellbeing, the team looked at the participants' responses to questions about their overall life satisfaction, as well as about recent psychological experiences, such as feelings of unhappiness, anxiety, or depression.

For their analysis, Ramos and his colleagues also considered responses to questions about local social cohesion. These questions asked participants about the extent to which local friends meant a lot to them and that they felt they 'belonged' to their neighbourhood, for example.  

The results plotted a consistent inverted U-shaped pattern. Participants who reported that less than half of their friends were of the same race, or of a similar age, level of income, or education gave the lowest ratings of neighbourhood cohesion, and also had the poorest wellbeing. With an increase in the proportion of same-group friends, cohesion and wellbeing scores rose – but only to a point.

Scores hit a turning point at roughly the midpoint of the homophily rankings. Beyond this point, as friendship groups became increasingly homogenous, perceived neighbourhood cohesion and wellbeing decreased again.

This team concludes that their analysis suggests that 'too little' or 'too much' homophily negatively impacts feelings of social cohesion and, in turn, subjective wellbeing. "These findings support the idea that heterogenous social networks are critical for bridging social capital."

There are some limitations to the study, including the fact that all the participants lived in England, meaning that the results won't necessarily apply to other cultures. However, this work does suggest that a balance between friends who are 'like' us (at least, in the four ways considered in this study) and others who are different seems to be optimal for wellbeing. This may be because such a balance satisfies the drives to forge connections with people who are like us — and also not like us.

Given their findings, the team argues that care should be taken to ensure that we have the opportunity to form friendships with people from both ends of this similarity spectrum. That could mean working to create more diverse schools, and more housing options within mixed neighbourhoods, they write, as well as ensuring that some groups aren't priced out of potentially shared spaces.

Read the paper in full:

Ramos, M. R., Li, D., Bennett, M. R., Mogra, U., Massey, D. S., & Hewstone, M. (2024). Variety Is the Spice of Life: Diverse Social Networks Are Associated With Social Cohesion and Well-Being. Psychological Science, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241243370