Over the past two years, as part of our College Free Speech Rankings, we’ve asked about 120,000 students whether they’d allow various hypothetical controversial speakers on both sides of the political spectrum.1 We give students tolerance scores based on their willingness to allow those speakers, and those scores are plotted above as a function of students’ reported number of close friends. As noted above, what we find is that having more close friends is tied to lower tolerance, especially for women. The more friends a woman has, the less tolerant she tends to be.
