Can outside interventions foster socio-culturally diverse friendships? We executed a large field experiment that randomized the seating charts of 182 primary-school classrooms (N=2,996 students) for the duration of one semester. We found that being seated next to each other increased the...

We study whether interactions between individuals with different skills, expertise and perspectives influenced innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940. We introduce and validate a new measure of social interactional diversity based on the distribution of surnames: lower surname diversity...