If 99 out of a 100 people are white and 1 is black, which percentage of white people will have a black best friend, assuming random assignment of friends? 1%!
The term "best friend" is ambiguous in the article, but I suspect they mean something like "the child's top 3 best friends." The 8% figure would actually be shockingly high to me if it referred to the number of white kids who would name a kid of another race as their very best friend, given the fact that people of the same race tend to be clustered geographically.
The statistic was given earlier by the NurtureShock authors in this Newsweek blog post, but the use of the phrase "best friend" is equally ambiguous there, and they don't cite a source, instead moving on to talk about a different study:
The term "best friend" is ambiguous in the article, but I suspect they mean something like "the child's top 3 best friends." The 8% figure would actually be shockingly high to me if it referred to the number of white kids who would name a kid of another race as their very best friend, given the fact that people of the same race tend to be clustered geographically.
The statistic was given earlier by the NurtureShock authors in this Newsweek blog post, but the use of the phrase "best friend" is equally ambiguous there, and they don't cite a source, instead moving on to talk about a different study:
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/09/...