Comfort and routine quietly shape our social preferences

Comfort and routine guide much of life, and new research reveals how they shape our social preferences and living patterns.

Researchers led by Kasimir Dederichs at the University of Oxford found that, on average, people favor neighborhoods and clubs filled with others who share their age, ethnicity, or education.

The team ran three pre-registered conjoint experiments, a method that asks people to choose between realistic options that vary across several traits.

Put simply, participants viewed pairs of neighborhoods or organizations that differed in social makeup, cost, travel time, and other features, then selected the one they preferred.

Clear social preferences emerge

Across nearly 30,000 choices made by thousands of Dutch adults, the pattern was consistent: people leaned toward settings with more neighbors or members similar to themselves in age, ethnicity, and education.

Two examples make the trade-offs concrete. Adults under 50 were willing to travel about five minutes farther to join a club where roughly one-quarter of the members were over 50 rather than one-half.

Dutch residents without a migration background accepted about 10 extra minutes of daily travel if it meant living where no neighbors had Turkish or Moroccan backgrounds rather than where one-quarter did.

One exception stood out. Respondents without a college degree did not show a preference for settings matched to their education level. Those with degrees did show that preference, and they showed it clearly.

Small preferences, big consequences

Tiny tilts can add up. Schelling’s classic model shows how mild desires for similar neighbors can produce sharp segregation once many people make the same kind of choice.

The new results fit that logic: when people can sort across several steps – such as choosing both a club and a team within it – each small preference at each step compounds the overall separation.

The study also tracked the settings people already occupy. Those surrounded by similar others showed stronger ingroup preferences than peers who spent more time with different-age, different-education, or different-ethnicity neighbors or members.

This pattern aligns with decades of work on homophily, the well-replicated finding that social ties form more easily among similar people. Less exposure to difference makes even small preferences for similarity harder to soften.

Impacts on daily groups

Neighborhoods set the stage for long-term contact, while civic groups like sports clubs and cultural associations create regular routines. The study found similar preferences for similarity in both settings, which helps explain why bridging ties can be rare even when diversity increases.

There were a few nuances. In younger samples choosing sports clubs, ethnic preferences were weaker than in other civic groups or neighborhoods, suggesting a narrow pocket where mixing may be easier.

Policy debates often circle back to contact. A large meta-analysis across more than 500 studies shows that real, repeated intergroup contact tends to reduce prejudice and that more rigorous studies find larger effects. So it is not only exposure that matters but the quality and stability of the interactions that follow.

“People prefer to associate with people who are very similar to themselves,” said Jochem Tolsma of Radboud University.

That preference is not destiny. It is a starting point that smart design can address by lowering the friction of contact and raising the chances that cooperation feels normal.

Cycles of segregation

When individuals act on small preferences, segregation does not just appear – it reinforces itself. Once people move into settings dominated by their own group, they become less likely to interact with outsiders, which in turn strengthens their preference for similarity.

The team saw this cycle in their data: respondents living in less diverse neighborhoods or clubs reported stronger ingroup preferences, showing how social environments and personal choices feed each other in a loop that is hard to break.

This research was conducted in the Netherlands, and context matters. In the United States, for example, a video experiment found that neighborhood racial composition strongly affected white respondents’ choices even when social class was held constant.

Cultures, histories, and policy environments shift the details. Still, the core finding here is about everyday choices rather than national policy – making it more likely to travel across borders than one might expect.

Designing for small preferences

If people act on small preferences for similarity, then interventions need to work with that grain rather than against it.

Reducing practical costs of mixed settings, building routines that create shared goals, and highlighting common identity within groups can help.

Clubs and associations can play an outsized role because entry barriers are lower than for moving house. When organizations set norms that reward cooperation and keep participation stable, they give contact time to do its work.

The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

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