Who is more likely to have different-race friends and acquaintances: people who are generally kind and nice or people who are generally open-minded and curious? Although being kind and nice may seem like the obvious answer—surely, mean and unkind people will not want to seek out friends from outside their own group—we didn't find research on this question. Thus, we sought to answer it.
Several of our studies were done with majority-Asian students at the University of California, Berkeley. This setting offered a unique site for our research, as it is located in one of the most racially diverse areas in the U.S. and because the campus is generally very supportive of diversity and cross-race interactions. We also studied majority-White, employed adults aged 30–60 whom we recruited online. This allowed us to examine whether any results obtained in the undergraduate samples generalized to broader portions of the U.S., which is less racially diverse and where there are more neutral or hostile norms toward cross-race interaction and diversity.
We measured each participant's personality traits, some innocuous filler questions, and then a social network task. In it, participants first listed people whom they relied on to accomplish various social tasks (confide in, hang out with, borrow money from, lend money to, and others) and then named several long-term friends and recent acquaintances met in the previous year. Afterwards, when the nominated friends and acquaintances could not be changed, participants reported the race of each of the friends and acquaintances and, lastly, their own race. Our key outcome was whether each nominated friend's and acquaintance's race differed from the participant's race.
Is Personality Related to the Race of People's Friends and Acquaintances?
We found that being generally kind and nice was insufficient to form long-term friendships and novel acquaintanceships with people who were a different race from participants. Instead, being generally open-minded and curious was sufficient.
Being generally kind and nice corresponds to the broader personality trait of Agreeableness, and being generally open-minded and curious belongs under the broader personality trait called Openness. Other major traits—Conscientiousness (being organized and productive), Extraversion (being energetic and outgoing), and Neuroticism (being emotionally volatile, anxious, and depressed)—did not relate to having more or fewer different-race friends and acquaintances. Openness was the only consistent predictor of having more different-race friends and acquaintances.
This first result for Openness is important because it shows that although different-race friendships are interpersonal in nature, their development does not depend on conventional interpersonal traits like Agreeableness or Extraversion. Instead, to form relationships across racial lines, it helps to be open-minded and curious—in other words, willing to engage the unknown and potentially uncomfortable experiences that could result from going beyond one's own group.
For the second contribution of this work, we sought to better predict having cross-race relationships using a more intergroup-focused facet of Openness. Although Openness covers a wide range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, including curiosity, imagination, and aesthetic appreciation, it does a poor job describing how people engage with intergroup relations. As intergroup relations are a major part of contemporary life (consider gender, race, ethnicity, political ideology), personality traits that are adaptations to these interactions should exist. Thus, we introduced Openness to Other—people's appreciation, embrace of, and preference for social difference in their environments—as a novel facet of Openness.
Compared to broad Openness, Openness to Other was the better predictor of different-race friendships. In fact, Openness to Other accounted for the relationship between broad Openness and different-race friendship. People who were higher on Openness to Other had nearly equal numbers of different- and same-race friends and acquaintances, whereas people lower on Openness to Other had nearly four times as many same- as different-race friends and acquaintances. Importantly, these results did not depend on the size of the participants' own racial group. Accounting for the availability of same- and different-race relationships (in other words, base rates) did not remove the effect of Openness to Other. As well, the relationship between Openness to Other and different-race friendships held for members of both numerical majority groups (Asian in our undergraduate samples; White in our online sample) and numerical minority groups (non-Asian in our undergraduate samples; non-White in our online sample).
Thus, developing cross-race relationships has more to do with being generally open-minded and curious, and little to do with being generally kind and nice. Furthermore, intergroup-focused personality traits do exist and do connect meaningfully to social behavior. And finally, having different-race friends and acquaintances has a basis in fundamental psychological attributes, like personality traits, that is independent of structural features, like base rates.
For Further Reading
Antonoplis, S., & John, O. P. (2022). Who has different-race friends, and does it depend on context? Openness (to other), but not agreeableness, predicts lower racial homophily in friendship networks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(5), 894-919.
Stephen Antonoplis is a post-doctoral scholar at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. He studies how personality and social structure (such as social networks and economic factors) interact over the lifespan.
Oliver P. John is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies individual differences in personality and emotion regulation processes.
