6914: Room For Change.

From The New York Times. Hey, maybe Madison Avenue executives should be forced to room—or at least share cubicles—with minorities.

Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice

By Tamar Lewin

As a freshman at Ohio State University, and the only black student on his floor, Sam Boakye was determined to get good grades — in part to make sure his white roommate had no basis for negative racial views.

“If you’re surrounded by whites, you have something to prove,” said Mr. Boakye, now a rising senior who was born in Ghana. “You’re pushed to do better, to challenge the stereotype that black people are not that smart.”

Several recent studies, at Ohio State and elsewhere, have found that having a roommate of a different race can reduce prejudice, diversify friendships and even boost black students’ academic performance. But, the research found, such relationships are more stressful and more likely to break up than same-race pairings.

As universities have grown more diverse, and interracial roommate assignments are more common, social scientists have looked to them as natural field experiments that can provide insights on race relations.

“From a scientific standpoint, when these roommates are paired, you have a natural experiment going on, in an area that’s very difficult to test empirically,” said Thomas E. Trail, a graduate student in psychology at Princeton University who has studied interracial roommates. “You couldn’t very well set up an experiment assigning people to spend several months living with someone of a different race.”

Russell H. Fazio, an Ohio State psychology professor who has studied interracial roommates there and at Indiana University, discovered an intriguing academic effect. In a study analyzing data on thousands of Ohio State freshmen who lived in dorms, he found that black freshmen who came to college with high standardized test scores earned better grades if they had a white roommate — even if the roommate’s test scores were low. The roommate’s race had no effect on the grades of white students or low-scoring black students. Perhaps, the study speculated, having a white roommate helps academically prepared black students adjust to a predominantly white university.

That same study found that randomly assigned interracial roommates at Ohio State broke up before the end of the quarter about twice as often as same-race roommates.

Because interracial roommate relationships are often problematic, Dr. Fazio said, many students would like to move out, but university housing policies may make it hard to leave.

“At Indiana University, where housing was not so tight, more interracial roommates split up,” he said. “Here at Ohio State, where there was a housing crunch, they were told to work it out. The most interesting thing we found was that if the relationship managed to continue for just 10 weeks, we could see an improvement in racial attitudes.”

Read the full story here.