A recently published journal article features results from research on diverse friendships — a collaboration between Dr. Eli Tsukayama, associate professor of Business Administration at the University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu, and colleagues at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The article, “Open-mindedness predicts racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of real-world friendship networks,” was published April online in Sage Journals.
“Open-minded people have more diverse friends,” Tsukayama said, summarizing the research article. “In other words, people who try to understand other people’s point of view have more friends of different races, political views, and family backgrounds.”
He added, “Diverse friendships are important because they can lead to more empathy, social intelligence, creativity, problem-solving, resilience, upward social mobility, political engagement, and communication skills, as well as reduce prejudice and stereotypes.”
Tsukayama collaborated with Yeji Park at Princeton University, Dr. Kate M. Turetsky at Columbia University, and Dr. Angela L. Duckworth at University of Pennsylvania.
According to their research abstract, “Even in environments offering ample opportunities to interact with people from diverse backgrounds, people differ in their tendency to form intergroup friendships. Whereas some develop intergroup friendships, others prefer befriending ingroup members, contributing to prejudice and polarization. We identify open-mindedness — an inclination to engage with and understand different perspectives — as an individual difference predicting the racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of real-world friendship networks.”
The abstract continued, “In a longitudinal study of 1,423 eighth–ninth graders, more open-minded adolescents developed more racially diverse friendship networks over 2 years. Two additional studies (total N = 1,585 adults) replicated and extended this finding: Open-mindedness predicted greater racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of friends, and was more consistently associated with friendship diversity than Big Five openness to experience. The associations between open-mindedness and friendship diversity were partly explained by open-minded individuals’ lower avoidance of interaction with outgroup members. Building open-mindedness may be one individual-level approach to promote friendships across divides.”
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Read the article, “Open-mindedness predicts racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of real-world friendship networks,” in its entirety via UH West O‘ahu’s James & Abigail Campbell Library DSpace repository.