Large, Mobile Settings Foster Narrow Social Relations

Consistent with G.K. Chesterton’s intuition, friends in large mobile settings tend to be more similar than friends in small immobile settings

A friend recently sent me the following quote from the English polymath G.K. Chesterton:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilised societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.

This morning, I happened upon an article by Bahns et al., which provides evidence in support of Chesterton’s hypothesis. The authors collected data on pairs of friends at two American college campuses, one large and one small. They found that friends at the large campus tended to be more similar than those at the small campus on a variety of attitudes and behaviour, including political views, prejudice and smoking. (Though friends at the small campus apparently had more similar exercise habits.)