Friendships that bridge economic divides are good for social mobility, a major study has found, with low-income children growing up where there is more mixing among income groups likely to earn an extra £5,100 a year as adults.
The research, combining anonymised Facebook data covering 20 million adults in the UK with official data, points to the benefits of what the authors call more “economically connected communities”.
These areas are characterised by higher levels of friendship across income levels – often sparked in school, at university or in what the researchers call “hobby and recreation groups”, such as amateur sports teams.
The study finds that low-income children who grew up in the 10% most economically connected local authority areas tend to earn £5,100 more a year than those from the 10% least-connected areas.
The project was carried out by an international group of researchers including the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in the UK (previously known as the Nudge Unit), as well as Meta and researchers from Stanford University in the US.
They found that affluent metropolitan areas tend to have more cross-class friendships – but areas with similar proportions of higher-income residents can still have differing levels of connectedness.
As an example, they point out that Kingston upon Thames and Canterbury have a similarly affluent population, but “the share of high-income friends among low-income residents is 10% higher in Kingston upon Thames”.
Dr Antonio Silva, principal investigator at BIT, said: “It’s important to clarify that levels of economic connectedness are also associated with high income. It’s inescapable: rich areas have more rich people, therefore you’re more likely to make friends with rich people.
“But when we do statistical analysis where we look at various other factors – such as education, health, income – economic connectedness still comes out as the second strongest predictor of social mobility after income.”
As part of the study, they sent researchers to neighbourhoods with similar income levels, but that had scored particularly high or low.
“We blinded them, so we didn’t tell them if this was high or low connectedness. And they just spent the afternoon there talking to people – going to the pubs, going to churches. And what was fascinating was that every single time, they got it right,” Silva said.
The research echoes a similar study carried out in the US, and found that the UK tends to be less economically segregated – the poorest half of the population in the UK have about half (47%) of their friendships with the higher-income half, for example, compared with 39% in the US.
A survey carried out as part of the research suggested that cross-class friendships also tend to lead to higher levels of happiness and trust in others.
The study is part of a wider project about how the UK could boost its social capital – the hard-to-measure human connections that help economies to thrive.
Silva said this early evidence suggested policies to encourage links like these would be worth pursuing. “It opens up a new opportunity to develop and scale-up ways of promoting connectedness across economic lines, whether that be by expanding access to sports groups or encouraging low-income young people to go to university,” he said.
Another policy the next stage of the study will look at is whether larger schools, which tend to include a wider mix of pupils, are good for promoting economic connectedness.
