Amid these turbulent times, as our society comes to grips with headlines about wars, the latest health scares, rising prices and social upheaval, people feeling a loss of personal control tend to seek out others who are more like themselves.
That’s according to new research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business.
Researchers consistently found when people experienced a loss of personal control, they were more likely to be drawn to those who resembled them, in race, religion, socioeconomic class or personality characteristics.
“Our research shows that feeling a lack of personal control often leads to people forming homogeneous teams, thus limiting exposure to other, diverse perspectives and, ultimately, stifling innovation and collaboration,” said Jessica Paek, assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at Kelley.
This preference is explained by a greater desire for order and predictability, the paper concluded.
“People tended to prefer coworkers who resembled them because they were more likely to share the same understanding of the world and seem more predictable than those who were different,” Paek said. “Our findings also may partly explain the sharp increase in social division that we are seeing lately — from racial and religious segregation to heightened political polarization.”
The article, “Threats to personal control fuel similarity attraction,” appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other authors were Anyi Ma, assistant professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Fangzhou Liu, assistant professor of management at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China; and Jae Yun Kim, assistant professor and the Richard Morantz and Sheree Walder Morantz Professor in Business Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
While their findings may be seen as a truism, little previously has been known about when people are more or less likely to favor those like themselves. The researchers set out to better understand what motivates this behavior, especially as societies are becoming more diverse.
The findings are based on 11 correlational and experimental studies, including an analysis of data involving nearly 90,000 people from the World Values Survey (42,118 were women and 45,914 men). Across all the studies, Paek and her colleagues consistently found that the loss of personal control consistently predicted the control-motivated preference for similar others.
In one study involving data from 60 countries, they found that those who indicated a lower sense of personal control were less likely to prefer having neighbors who had a different religion, race or spoke another language.
In her research, Paek investigates how people can better pursue their goals in organizations and society. “The aim of my work is to better understand the barriers to successful goal pursuit and the interpersonal dynamics that aid or hinder goal pursuit in organizations,” she said.
“Ultimately, our work highlights how a fundamental human tendency — our desire to affiliate with others like us — can lead to challenges in building more inclusive, innovative, and cooperative workplaces in times of social unrest when we feel we lack control,” Paek and her colleagues wrote. “By highlighting the critical, explanatory role of the need for order and predictability, our findings are important for businesses looking to create resilient, inclusive environments that can withstand times of uncertainty.”