Children who grow up in low-income families but make friends from higher-income families are more likely to have higher incomes as adults than those with fewer friends.
There is little doubt that connections and the social environment are determinants of people’s development and status. Researchers at Harvard University decided to test this hypothesis analyzing anonymous Facebook data belonging to 72.2 million people in the US aged between 25 and 44, representing 84% of the US population in this age group.
The team used a machine learning algorithm to determine each person’s socioeconomic status, combining data such as the average income of people living in the same region, their age, gender, and the value of their model phone as an indicator of individual income. .
The average income of the studied households was around US$58,000. The researchers then divided the subjects into two groups: those below the median and those above the median.
If people randomly made friends, you would expect half of each person’s friends to be from each income group. But instead, for people below that figure, only 38% of their friends were above it. Meanwhile, 70.6% of friends of people who were above average were also part of the same group.
Poorer children were more likely to have higher incomes as adults if they had wealthier friends.
The team compared these numbers with those for economic mobility produced by a Harvard University research project called Atlas of Opportunities. This project uses census and tax data to determine the median household income at age 35 for a person born in the US between 1978 and 1983. Data is broken down by race, sex, location, and parental income.
The research team combined this data with Facebook analysis and found that poorer children were more likely to have higher incomes as adults if they were born in areas where poorer people had a greater number of richer friends.
Using this data, the scientists mapped people’s friendships back to where they were formed. To do this, the team rated the formation of about 30% of friendships in a specific location, such as a high school, a religious group, or because they live in the same neighborhood. They then modeled what would happen to adults in below-average socioeconomic status groups if they were exposed to the same number of people with above-average socioeconomic status as the average of that group.
The team found that about half of the economic disparity between the two groups can be explained by lack of exposure. This could be due to various factors like living in different neighborhoods or attending different schools as you can’t make friends with someone you don’t get a chance to get to know.
The study shows that the more segregated students are by geographic location, the less likely they are to have the opportunity to make friends with students from higher-income families, which favors the creation of more mixed schools in terms of composition.
REFERENCE
Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility