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School brochure pictures notwithstanding, by and large, students hang around kids of their same race. But it turns out that the type of school they go to might encourage or subvert this tendency.
A new study by Siwei Chang and Yu Xie of the University of Michigan analyzed simulated data from a model of how we form friends as well as the real friendships of 4,745 American high school students and concluded that the smaller the school (i.e., the context for making friends), the more likely students were to form interracial friendships.
In a press release, Xie is quoted as saying, “We found that total school size had a major effect on the likelihood that students would form interracial friendships. Large schools promote racial segregation and discourage interracial friendships.”
