The United States is increasingly diverse ethnically and racially. Studies have shown that for young people, simply being around peers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds may not be enough to improve attitudes toward and relationships with other groups. Instead, children and adolescents also need to value spending time and forming relationships with peers from diverse groups. A new study examined how friends in middle school affect each other’s attitudes about interacting with peers of different ethnicities and races, finding that they influence each other’s racial and ethnic views significantly. The study was done by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of California-Irvine. It appears in Child Development, a journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. The study collected information from 524 ethnically diverse students in grades 6, 7, and 8 who attended a middle school in the Midwestern United States. The students filled out surveys asking them about their friends in school and their attitudes toward diversity — how they felt about interacting with peers from different ethnic and racial groups. The researchers found that students who had more positive attitudes about interacting with peers from other ethnic and racial groups were most likely to be friends with students who shared the same attitudes. Students with more positive attitudes were less likely to select friends of the same race and ethnicity than those with less positive attitudes. And students’ attitudes became more similar to their friends’ over time.