Large cities have a pretty good reputation as far as innovation goes.  Their cultural diversity is said to bring a wide range of ideas together into a melting pot, with the resulting evolution leading to all manner of new companies, products and services.  Steven Johnson is a particular advocate of this belief.  In his book Where Good Ideas Come From he says “As cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip,”, citing the Vienna coffee houses for Sigmund Freud or the Italian towns that helped spawn the Renaissance.

Research however would cast doubt on this heuristic.  A study looked at how diversity spreads across a university campus.  They wanted to test the theory that larger campuses, with therefore greater diversity, would lead to us seeking out fresh people, with fresh ideas. The flipside of course is that smaller campuses, with less diversity, would lead to greater homogenity.

They compared a university with a student body of over 25,000 students with smaller schools with an average of around 500 students to see how diverse friendship groups were on the various campuses.  People were asked about their opinions on things like religion, their exercise routines, views on birth control, binge drinking and so on.  Their answers provided a basic portrait of each individual to use in the analysis.

The standard thinking is that when there are lots of diverse people to interact with, as in a large city, that we seek out all of this diversity and devour its richness in all of its glory.  The research findings however suggested something else entirely.  They found that students at the large university spent most of their time with people that were just like them.   What's more, they did so much more than the students in the smaller university.  The level of correlation between friends was 80% higher in the large university than in the smaller ones.

These findings suggest that rather than using the large student body to find a diverse range of people, they were instead using this large group to find people who were as close to themselves as possible.  Instead of learning from people who were extremely different – who disagreed with their stance on abortion, or didn’t like ultimate frisbee, or never attended football games – the students were obeying the similarity-attraction effect, sifting through the vast population to find the most homologous possible circle of friends. As the researchers put it, “the larger social contexts afford better opportunity for finegrained assortment.”

So with these findings in mind, are large cities really centres of innovation or are they merely places for people to find those just like themselves?  Johnson has gone on to suggest that the web is akin to a city both in the way it evolves and the way it fosters innovation (see his TED video at the end of this post).  Again though, does this research point to an Internet where people trawl to find niches that fit them like a glove rather than seeking out those that are different?  Does it merely enforce existing prejudices and entrench our point of view as we can gorge ourselves on exactly the content we like, with who we like, whenever we like?

Here's that TED video for you.  Let me know what you think in the comments.