Richer, More Mobile Americans Prefer Shallower, More Plentiful Friendships

When it comes to winning friends and influencing people, most Americans prefer shallower, broader social networks whenever they can afford to, or when living life on the move. BFFs are for poorer people who stay put.

Yes, it’s a cynical world we live in.

That’s the implication, anyway, of a new study co-authored by professors Shigehiro Oishi, of the University of Virginia, and Selin Kesebir, of the London Business School, which suggests that socio-economic factors play a determining role in how we build and rely upon our social networks.

Specifically, the research (to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science) indicates that economically disadvantaged, geographically immobile people are more satisfied with smaller, deeper social networks while the rest—those of us who move around a lot but are still poor, or who are economically better-off—prefer social networks that are broader but shallower. In other words, quantity, not necessarily quality.

For the study (one of two outlined in the paper—but for purposes of this article we’ll confine it to one), Oishi and Kesebir administered a survey to 247 Americans. Subjects were asked to imagine three types of friends and assign each a set of real-world initials to make them seem more vivid: “close friends,” defined in the survey as “someone you feel very close to, so close that it would be hard to imagine life without”; “close,” defined as “not quite as close as those in the inner circle, but still close”; and “distant,” defined as people with whom participants felt “less close” but “who are still important.” Among those groups, participants were asked to divide and spend 60 imaginary points, representing their time, money and energy.

Participants were then asked questions about their subjective sense of well-being, using the “Satisfaction With Life Scale” developed by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, and Griffin in 1985. Having obtained the zip codes of most participants’ place of residence, the authors used U.S. Census data from 2000 to determine the median income and residential mobility of each zip code’s population and transposed it onto the survey sample and looked for correlations.

They found that subjects in zip codes with a low median income and low residential mobility rates were dramatically happier when their social circles were both narrow and deep. Among wealthier Americans and among poorer Americans with more mobility, possessing narrow, deep social circles made people less happy than having broader, shallower ones—particularly among wealthier who moved less. (One imagines bored, wealthy people hemmed in by their quotidian successes, thirsting for adventure.)

Some fascinating sociology underlies the findings: Consciously or not, many Americans, it seems, have found that there are distinct economic advantages to having a broad network of acquaintances. Citing sociologist Mark Granovetter’s 1974 book, Getting a Job, the study’s authors note that subjects who had recently found a job in Granovetter’s study had “got(ten) the lead about the job ypening from someone they met approximately only once a year, and found that “having many acquaintances increased the chances of getting unique information on job opportunities.”

Furthermore, people who got jobs through mere acquaintances “were making more money and were more satisfied with their job than those who got the job through close friends or relatives”—a social phenomenon Granovetter dubbed “the strength of weak ties.”

Americans’ high level of residential mobility could also partly explain their preference for broader shallower social networks. “To minimize the damage of a friend’s departure to a person’s social network…” the authors write, citing more previous scholarship. “It is important to spread one’s time and resources among many friends instead of putting all one’s eggs in one basket… (Americans) intuitively know that they will lose some of their friends when they or their friends move away.”

But if having lots of casual acquaintances is a key (or at least an adjunct) to success, why do poorer, less-residentially-mobile people prefer the company of just a few good friends? Again, the authors propose, the answer is at least partly about economic advantage: “In economically challenging conditions, one’s chance of obtaining major help is higher if one has deep ties with a small number of friends than if one has shallow ties with a large number of friends,” they conclude. “Likewise, if the community is residentially stable, friends are there for you forever.”

Of course, for poor people leading relatively static lives, sticking with a few close friends isn’t just about strategy, it’s also about opportunity—or lack of it. Poorer, less mobile people have less opportunity to meet new people. Perhaps some may learn to rationalize that dearth in ways in terms of choice, which feels more empowering. I asked Oishi about this. He agreed this could be a factor. “Residential mobility itself is associated with relational mobility,” he wrote and referred to the work of behavioral scientist, Masaki Yuki: “namely, the more mobile, the more opportunities to make new friends.”

One wonders how well these trends will hold over time, however—or how accurately they describe Americans today. In his landmark 2000 survey of American civic decline, Bowling Alone, social scientist Robert Putnam noted that both short- and long-distance mobility had declined in the United States during the preceding 50 years. As noted in a Washington Post article last May, a scholarly paper by the Federal Reserve Bank notes that interstate migration in the United States—once undertaken by 3 percent of all Americans each year—declined by 50 percent between 1991 and 2011.

In that context, the findings of this new study are certainly suggestive, but they feel weakened by their reliance upon census data from 2000. For starters, zip codes that were highly itinerant in the 1990s may be much less so now. And how may neighborhoods have changed dramatically in financial terms since 2000, a time during which young white-collar types have fled the suburbs en masse to repopulate the nation’s downtowns? (One could hardly find a better example than the zip code 11211, where Motherboard’s offices are located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.)

Still, the differences between the socio-economic groups studied are dramatic enough to suggest that if you’re feeling stuck, you might want to start getting out of the house more. Even if it hurts a little.