🛟 Why People Seek Safety in Similarity
New research shows threats to personal control drive people away from social diversity
When you build social bonds with people who are similar to you, it comes with both costs and benefits. On the plus side, it can help with developing cohesive social networks in which people have a lot in common. On the negative side, highly homogenous social groups can produce out-group prejudices and a limited world view. Diverse social networks help to broaden our sense of personal identity and awareness, while also supporting healthier and more inclusive societies in the modern world where diverse people will frequently bump into each other.
So what kinds of barriers and mental pressures might lead people toward excessive self-similarity in social groups? An obvious answer is that people find it easier to connect with others who share specific hobbies, cultures, and life histories. You don’t have to work so hard to strike up a smooth conversation, and it’s relatively easy to find topics of discussion that are interesting to both parties.
A less obvious and perhaps more detrimental influence is that people feel safer when they’re with similar others. Unfamiliarity is often perceived as threatening, especially if you’ve spent most of your life in highly homogenous social environments.
Consistent with this idea, one new study suggests that a desire for structure, order, and predictability drives people toward self-similar social networks. More specifically, when people feel as though their sense of personal control is under attack, they’re less willing to engage with those who seem different to them.
👥 The link between personal control and social diversity
In a paper published in 2024, researchers described a series of 11 wide-ranging studies looking into the link between personal control and social diversity.
In their first correlational study, they analyzed survey data from 88,117 participants across the world. This survey data included self-report measures of how much personal control people felt over their lives and their willingness to live next to neighbors from different ethnic or religious backgrounds. The data showed that participants with a lower sense of personal control were less inclined to want socially diverse neighbors.
The researchers replicated this effect with a new survey looking at how much people prefer similar vs dissimilar coworkers depending on a wider range of personal characteristics including personality, interests, age, skills, etc. Once again, people who felt less control over their lives preferred to have more similar coworkers.
In a third study, the researchers looked for causal evidence to confirm whether changes in a person’s sense of control would affect how they feel about diverse collaborators. They recruited 115 students and gave each of them the opportunity to discuss their views with two other participants before selecting one of them to collaborate with on a task.
Before making their choices, half of the students completed a task designed to boost their sense of personal control: they were asked to look at pairs of symbols on a computer screen and choose their favorites.
The other half of the students completed a version of the task designed to reduce their sense of control: they were told to choose a particular type of symbol based on a hidden characteristic they had to infer. In reality, feedback on whether they were correct or incorrect for each choice was entirely random, making them wrong 50% of the time and reducing their sense of control over their environment.
Since it’s often easier to connect with similar others, both sets of participants—personal control boosted and personal control reduced—preferred to choose the more self-similar student to collaborate with. However, this tendency was significantly stronger among students who had their sense of personal control diminished. While some homogeneity in social interactions can be useful as a social lubricant, threats to personal control may push people toward an unhealthier extreme of diversity exclusion.
Additional experiments showed that threats to personal control can increase a person’s need for structure, and this need for structure is then met by seeking self-similar friends, neighbors, or collaborators. To test this effect in a natural setting, one of the studies was a longitudinal study of 360 employees at three different Chinese companies over the course of one month. At the start of the month, researchers assessed each employee’s sense of personal control and need for structure, while at the end of the month, they assessed preferences for self-similar coworkers.
Consistent with the previous research, employees with a lower sense of personal control were more likely to want self-similar coworkers a month later, and this effect was mediated by their stronger need for structure.
Altogether, the research suggests a robust link between how much personal control we feel over our lives and how much we generally welcome different people into our social circles. Even when people aren’t necessarily prejudiced or hostile to social differences, threats to their sense of personal control can bias them toward avoiding those who appear different and gravitating toward those who seem more familiar.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Balance similarity and diversity in your social circles
The research above reveals that threats to personal control become a psychological barrier to embracing social diversity. A balance between homogeneity and diversity is likely to be ideal for social wellbeing (you can read more direct evidence for this in other studies). So it’s important to seek this balance by remaining aware of any fear you have around personal control and mitigating any unintended consequences of that fear.
#2. Find effective ways of meeting your need for structure
If you often worry about insufficient structure in your life, finding supportive behaviors to fill that need might help to reduce the impact of a threat to your sense of personal control. Examples could include setting stronger routines and habits and decluttering your life in areas that feel too busy. When these foundations no longer feel like unpredictable obstacles, you may develop a more robust sense of personal control over what life throws at you.
#3. Be aware of how tumultuous events affect your relationships
Some moments in life are more chaotic than others, and this could be for personal reasons like a loss of income or more global reasons like the coronavirus pandemic. The uncertainty and structural threat caused by these kinds of events can impact the kinds of relationships we choose to prioritize, but our instincts may be misguided by unhelpful biases. During those chaotic moments, be especially conscious about who you choose to interact with and why, and make sure it’s the people you actually care the most about.
“Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity. Life is not a monotone but a many-stringed harmony, and to this harmony is contributed a distinctive note by each individual.”
~ Annie Besant
This helps explain to me some of the polarization I see in American politics. Interesting.
Mel
This explains so well the political/social spiral that we see so often when groups close ranks. And it is just hard to work with people whose views you don't agree with (or, even worse, think are harmful) - it often means avoiding topics and not really being able to relax. And if we don't have the energy resources for that, it just doesn't happen.