Are you only friends with people like you?

In my experience, eating fish and chips at the seaside can be a life threatening experience. Not because of the quality of the fish and chips, but because of the flocks of birds trying to eat it at the same time.

On one memorable trip, I was in the process of trying to rescue my daughter's meal from a veracious seagull, when its partner in crime took the opportunity to swipe mine. I think they must have enjoyed it, because a few minutes later they deposited most of what they had digested on my head. In His wisdom, the Lord has ordained that trips to the beach would remind me of that old adage: birds of a feather, flock together.

The saying doesn't just apply to birds though. People tend to stick to those who are like them too. In other words, our circle of friends tend to be made up of people who are similar to us. This is well documented and true across many dimensions. According to one sociologist, Miller McPherson, the most significant divide is ethnicity, followed by age, religion, education and occupation, in roughly that order. So how do we begin to move towards difference when our instincts drive us towards similarity?