“When you have opportunity to choose your friends, you will tend to choose people who are similar to you; there’s a lot of evidence that we like similar others,” says Chris Crandall, psychology professor at the University of Kansas and co-author of the study entitled “Social Ecology of Similarity: Big Schools, Small Schools and Social Relationships.”

“We found that when you ask people what’s important in a friend, the people at the small colleges and the big colleges were pretty much the same,” says Crandall. “There were also no differences between the campuses with regard to how long they’d known each other, how old they were, how much time they spent together.”

Two differences did stand out, though. On larger campuses, people tended to be friends with those who held many of the same beliefs; in other words, they BFF’d (Best Friend Forever) themselves. And on small campuses, people had more diverse friends but rated those friendships as closer.

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