Personality and Individual Differences
Personality and Individual Differences
5 years ago

On wealth and the diversity of friendships: High social class people around the world have fewer international friends

Having international social ties carries many potential advantages, including access to novel ideas and greater commercial opportunities. Yet little is known about who forms more international friendships. Here, we propose social class plays a key role in determining people's internationalism. We conducted two studies to test whether social class is related positively to internationalism (the building social class hypothesis) or negatively to internationalism (the restricting social class hypothesis). In Study 1, we found that among individuals in the United States, social class was negatively related to percentage of friends on Facebook that are outside the United States. In Study 2, we extended these findings to the global level by analyzing country-level data on Facebook friends formed in 2011 (nearly 50 billion friendships) across 187 countries. We found that people from higher social class countries (as indexed by GDP per capita) had lower levels of internationalism—that is, they made more friendships domestically than abroad.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0191886915004973

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.