Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

The rise of compulsory education As the U.S. economy shifted from a more localized agrarian society to a mass production machine, families relocated closer to cities, and—at least initially—many sent their children to work in the factories. This triggered a countermovement to prevent kids from being forced to toil in mills. The solution: compulsory public education for kids. Between 1920 and 1936, the share of teenagers in high school more than doubled, from about 30 percent to more than 60 percent. As young people spent more time in school, they developed their own customs in an environment away from work and family, where they could enforce their own social rules. It is impossible to imagine American teenage culture in a world where every sixteen-year-old boy is working weekends jowl-to-jowl with his father on an assembly line.

The postwar economic boom A serious commercial interest in teenagers didn’t begin in earnest until after World War II. To entice marketers, teenagers needed money, and that money would come from two principal sources: the labor force and parents. The 1950s saw one of the great periods of economic expansion in American history. With full employment came rising wages for unionized adults and older teenage workers. Meanwhile, parents gradually had fewer children and spent more per child, as befits any scarce and valuable investment. Birthrates declined across the advanced world in the second half of the twentieth century due to both the rise of female education and the legalization of the pill. Since the 1970s, the richest 20 percent of U.S. households have more than doubled their spendin...

The invention of the car It might be a horrifying consideration for today’s singles, but a first date once meant an introductory chat in the living room with a girl’s parents. This might have been followed by a deliciously awkward family dinner. But cars emancipated romance from the stilted small talk of the family parlor. Just about everything a modern single person considers to be ...

Teenagers often act dumber around other teenagers. Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, put people of various ages in a simulated driving game with streets and stoplights. Adults drove the same, whether or not they had an audience. But teenagers took twice as many “chances”—like running a yellow light—when their friends were watching. Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to the influence of their peers. The precise definition of coolness may change over time, from cigarettes to Snaps, but the deep animal need to possess it does not.

For MAYA’s sake, “cool” means Most Autonomous Yet Appropriate.

At the end of the twentieth century, many teens gravitated to logos. The long economic expansion from the 1980s and the 1990s gave them the means to spend lavishly on clothing emblems. A fashion hit like Ralph Lauren was based not only on the quality of the garment, but also on the logo’s talismanic power in high school hallways. At the same time, the most popular TV shows on network and cable often featured beautiful California teenagers with sand-tousled hair, like The O.C. and Laguna Beach. Los Angeles culture beamed across the country and elevated surf-and-skate brands, like Hurley, Billabong, and Vans. Several decades of logo fever came to an abrupt end in the Great Recession. Nearly half of families experienced a job loss, a pay cut, or reduced hours, and youth unemployment soared to almost 19 percent. The richly embroidered logos on Ralph Lauren polo shirts were suddenly unwelcome in a financial downturn, and cheaper “fast-fashion” retailers like H&M, Zara, and Uniqlo grew.

Teenagers are the market’s neophiles, the group most likely to accept a new musical sound, a new clothing fashion, or a new technology trend. For adults, especially those with power and money, the rules are what keep you safe. When you’re young, every rule is illegitimate until proven otherwise. It is precisely because they have so little to lose from the way things are that young people will continue to be the inexhaustibly neophilic motor of culture.

Today there is little doubt about the rarefied air of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait. The Mona Lisa is the world’s most treasured painting, literally: It holds the Guinness World Record for the most expensive insurance policy on any art piece. In 1973, the art critic Kenneth Clark called the Mona Lisa the “supreme example of perfection,” saying it deserved its title as the most famous painting in the world. But in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t even the most famous painting in its museum, the Louvre in Paris. The historian Donald Sassoon reported that, in 1849, the Mona Lisa was valued at 90,000 francs. That’s a tidy sum, but not even close to Titian’s Supper at Emmaus (150,000 francs at the time) or Raphael’s The Holy Family (600,000 francs), which hung in the same museum. The Mona Lisa’s fame got an assist from a dim-witted thief. On August 11, 1911, a Monday, Vincenzo Peruggia, an unemployed Italian painter, walked into the Louvre and left with the Mona Lisa. French newspapers were aghast at the theft and indignantly proclaimed the painting’s historic significance. The Mona Lisa went missing for several years, until Peruggia—stuck with an expensive artwork whose sale would inevitably lead to his apprehension—tried to hawk the painting in Florence and was duly apprehended. The recovery of the Mona Lisa and its return to France was an international sensation. Several years after the painting’s recovery, in 1919, the modernist Marcel Duchamp made a replica of the Mona Lis...

To watch how ideas go from zero to a million, Watts designed a model universe with thousands of people—or nodes, as he calls them—connected to other people. Let’s call it Watts World. In Watts World, each person, or node, has two variables: vulnerability (how likely each person is to adopt a new behavior) and density (how many people are connected to each other). Watts triggered these networks of varying vulnerability and density over and over, millions of times, to watch trends spread to millions of people or, more often, not spread at all. The first thing he realized was that there are Goldilocks zones of vulnerability and density. It’s worthless to advertise to an older person who literally never changes her habits (“low vulnerability”) or to a Siberian hermit (“low density”). But the opposite poles are also problematic. Let’s say you’re equally susceptible to an ad from Bloomingdale’s, the Gap, and every other clothing outlet you see. This makes you a terrible bet for any one brand because you’re constantly changing your mind. A consumer who is hypervulnerable to every influence is no more reliable than a consumer who is impervious to all influence. Watts discovered a peculiar point in his network where cascades were incredibly rare but extremely large. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of one thousand in this particular Watts World, nothing would happen. But in that one-in-one-thousand moment, the entire network would light up—a massive global cascade. “Huh, that...

the chaos of life is a chronic condition for which stories are the remedy.

Like that song "The one I used to love."

“The breakout success of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had everything to do with its placement at the beginning of the film Blackboard Jungle,” said Jim Dawson, author of Rock Around the Clock: The Record That Started the Rock Revolution. The reaction to Blackboard Jungle was something like hysteria—not just among teenagers, but also among their parents and politicians. Kids danced in the aisles of movie theaters and blasted the song from their cars. On May 17 1955, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Princeton University dorms held a competition to play the song as loudly as possible from their rooms. Around midnight, the students emptied into the quads, set fires to trashcans, and chanted up and down the streets. Meanwhile, several major American cities censored the film. The mayor of Memphis forbade teenagers to see it, while Atlanta tried to ban the movie after an alderman’s wife said it threatened the “peace, health, morals, and good order of this city.”

By the end of the decade, rock and roll had conquered pop music, bringing with it several cultural and political shifts. First, the center of gravity in pop music shifted from the songs to the stars themselves.

Second, the rise of rock shook American culture in a decade otherwise known for its languid complacency. It’s well known that white bands mainstreamed a genre created by black musicians. But the creative exploitation of black artists was even more explicit than that: The most popular songs of the 1950s were often white covers of melodies originally performed by black artists, like “Sincerely” by the McGuire Sisters (originally by the Moonglows) and “Ko Ko Mo” by Perry Como (originally by Gene & Eunice). In 1955, Billboard finally declared “the emergence of the Negro as a pop artist in the disk field”; but, like Billboard’s 1991 consecration of hip-hop, this was a rather tardy acknowledgment of something that had been true for a decade or more. As the rock-and-roll pantheon became crowded with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly, critics still referred to it as “jungle music.” The magazine True Strange featured Haley on a 1957 cover with an illustration of several naked African tribesman dancing and beating drums. This was not just adults pooh-poohing loud music and performative hip gyrations. The music itself was an omen that white America was losing its cultural monopoly, and even suburban families would be forced to confront elements of a black culture that many did not want to acknowledge.

Success in Hollywood does not follow a normal distribution, with many films earning the box office average. Instead, movies follow a power law distribution, which means most of the winnings come from a tiny minority of films.

Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University and an expert in book publishing, summarizes the entertainment business this way: “A complex, adaptive, semi-chaotic industry with Bose-Einstein distribution dynamics and Pareto power law characteristics with dual-sided uncertainty.” That is quite the disfluent multisyllabic mouthful, but it’s worth breaking down word by word: “Complex”: Every year, there are hundreds of movies released to billions of potential viewers, who are watching ads, reading critics, and mimicking each other to decide what movie ticket they will buy next. In the short run, the best indication of next week’s movie sales is this week’s movie sales. But since everybody is constantly influencing everybody else, predicting the distant-future box office of a movie is like predicting the final resting place of sixteen billiard balls crisscrossing a table and smacking into each other. “Adaptive”: When a book in one genre succeeds—e.g., porny romance, dystopian young adult fiction, or nonfiction pop psychology books—the rest of the industry will adapt to copy it. But aggressive mimicking will eventually chase away the trend, rendering it obsolete by the time some adaptive products hit the market. Paying through the nose for A-list stars seemed like the best bet in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood, and superstar salaries entered a period of hyperinflation, until a few flops, like 1993’s Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, shattered the Hollywood...

If this makes the business of hits seem hopeless, then good. Making complex products for people who don’t know what they want—and who aggressively cluster around bizarrely popular products if a couple of their friends do the same—is unbelievably difficult work. It’s important to appreciate the stress inherent to being a creator, an entrepreneur, a music label, a movie studio, a media company. People are mysterious and markets are chaos. Is it any surprise that most creativity is failure?

One solution for taming the chaos is to own the channels of distribution. Making music is less risky when you can bribe radio stations to play your songs. So the music labels tried exactly that for decades, until the federal government deemed the practice unlawful with the FCC “payola rules.” Making movies is less risky when you own the theaters that play the films. So the film studios in fact owned many of the cinemas for decades, until the Supreme Court decided, in 1948, that this constituted an anticompetitive oligopoly, bringing an end to the ...

The next best solution is to surround audiences with advertising to ensure that every consumer who might be interested in a new product is aware of it. Americans bought almost thirty movie tickets a year in the 1940s. These days they buy about four. How could studios wrangle this newly fickle crowd into movie theaters? It would have to turn movies into national blockbuster events—lavish productions buoyed by monstrous marketing budgets with nonstop commercial and posters plastered on every square inch of the country. In a 1997 economic paper, De Vany said movie studios could reduce the risk of failure through “unprecedented promotional expenses.” And that’s exactly what they did. The number of major-studio films has fallen in the last two dec...

Finally, Hollywood has taken a lesson from the second chapter of this book and created original products rooted in familiarity—sequels, adaptations, and reboots of well-known properties. In the last twenty years, Hollywood’s core strategy has shifted toward multi-sequel franchises, particularly with superheroes at the center. In 1996, none of the ten biggest films were sequels or superhero movies (e.g., Independence Day, Twister, and The First Wives Club), and films based on comics accounted for just 0.69 percent of the box office. In each year so far this decade, most of the ten top-grossing films were sequels, prequels, or reboots. Of the first 371 movies released in 2016, just four superhero films—Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, Batman v. Superman, and X-Men: Apocalypse—accounted for 29 percent of the total box office. In a way, Hollywood has taken a lesson from old-fashioned serials (or modern television): If you find a story that clicks, keep churning out new episodes. The franchise strategy, which prizes familiarity and “preawareness” of characters and stories, is a commercial solution to the chaotic nature of art. But it’s also a direct response to the globalization...

The business of creativity is a game of chance—a complex, adaptive, semi-chaotic game with Bose-Einstein distribution dynamics and Pareto’s power law characteristics with dual-sided uncertainty. You, the creator, are making something that doesn’t exist for an audience that cannot say if they will like it beforehand. Dealing with this sort of uncertainty requires more than good ideas, brilliant execution, and powerful marketing (although it often requires those things, too). It also begs for a gospel of perseverance through inevitable failure. It’s like Duncan Watts said: If a trigger has a 1 percent chance of becoming a global cascade, it should create at least a few hits—if given hundreds of chances. There is no antidote to the chaos of creative markets, only the brute doggedness to endure it.

As George Lucas showed in the 1970s, the most successful storytellers are often collage artists, bringing together never-before-assembled allusions to create a story that is both surprising and familiar.

James’s longtime engagement with her fellow fanfic writers, cultivated over hours and hours of reading and responding to her fans and fellow adapters in online comment threads, had created something extraordinarily rare for a first-time author: a massive audience of readers, commenters, and fellow co-creators.

It’s become fashionable to talk about ideas as if they were diseases. Some pop songs are infectious, and some products are contagious. Advertisers and producers have developed a theory of “viral” marketing, which assumes that simple word of mouth can easily take a small idea and turn it into a phenomenon. This has fed a popular conception of buzz that says that companies don’t need sophisticated distribution strategies for their product to go big. If they make something that is inherently infectious, they can sit back and wait for it to explode like a virus: In epidemiology, “viral” has a specific meaning. It refers to a disease that infects more than one person before it dies or the host does. Such a disease has the potential to spread exponentially. One person infects two. Two infect four. Four infect eight. And before long, it’s a pandemic. Do ideas ever go viral in that way? For a long time, nobody could be sure. It’s difficult to precisely track word-of-mouth buzz or the spread of a fashion (like skinny jeans) or an idea (like universal suffrage) from person to person. So, by degrees, “That thing went viral” has became a fancy way of saying, “That thing got big really quickly, and we’re not sure how.” But there is a place where ideas leave an information trail: on the Internet. When I post an article on Twitter, it is shared and reshared, and each step of this cascade is traceable. Scientists can follow the trail of e-mails or Facebook posts as they move around the wo...

If ideas and articles on the Internet essentially never go viral, then how do some things still achieve such massive popularity so quickly? Viral spread isn’t the only way that a piece of content can reach a large population, the researchers said. There is another mechanism, called “broadcast diffusion”—many people getting information from one source. They wrote: Broadcasts can be extremely large—the Super Bowl attracts over 100 million viewers, while the front pages of the most popular news websites attract a similar number of daily visitors—and hence the mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles [a virus]. On the Internet, where it seems like everything is going viral, perhaps very little or even nothing is. They concluded that popularity on the Internet is “driven by the size of the largest broadcast.” Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments. Extended to the full world of hits, this new finding suggests that articles, songs, and products don’t spread like in the first picture we saw. Instead, almost all popular products and ideas have blockbuster moments where they spread from one source to many, many individuals at the same time—not like a virus, but something like this:

Disease is an infectious metaphor. We need a revised epidemiological analogy to rival the viral myth—one that explains how ideas can spread to many people at once, like a thousand people getting the flu from one source.

People are social creatures—they talk, they share, they pass things along. But unlike with an actual virus, a person chooses to be infected by an idea, and most people who confront any given thing don’t pass it along. Viral diseases tend to spread slowly, steadily, across many generations of infection. But information cascades are the opposite: They tend to spread in short bursts and die quickly. The gospel of virality has convinced some marketers that the only way that things become popular these days is by buzz and viral spread. But these marketers vastly overestimate the reliable power of word of mouth. Much of what outsiders call virality is really a function of what one might call “dark broadcasters”—people or companies distributing information to many viewers at once, but whose influence isn’t always visible to people outside of the network.

Mistaking dark broadcasts for viral spread is common. In 2012, a thirty-minute documentary about the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony became the “most viral video in history,” with one hundred million views on YouTube in just six days. It is unquestionably an amazing feat for a documentary to reach all-time Hollywood blockbuster distribution in less than a week. But was this really a case of pure viral spread, powered by millions of ordinary individuals sharing it with one or two people? Not really. The video was shared by pop stars like Rihanna and Taylor Swift, television stars like Oprah Winfrey and Ryan Seacrest, and some of Twitter’s largest broadcasters, including Kim Kardashian, with thirteen million followers at the time, and Justin Bieber, with eighteen million followers. These weren’t ordinary individuals passing the information to two or three other people like a virus. They were dark broadcasters sending the video to millions of people instantly within a densely connected network, even though many people who ultimately saw the video never knew that these celebrities were responsible for its distribution.

Microsoft Research scientists who studied the phenomenon saw the same thing. The video’s popularity did not bloom like a virus, spreading far and wide across many generations. The information cascade looks more like a bomb fuse—a quiet string of solitary shares followed by several explosions, in the form of celebrity tweets.

As we saw in the book’s first chapter, an individual broadcast is more powerful in an age with fewer channels of exposure. When there were only three television channels, for example, it was easier to get high ratings. But the future looks to be an age of abundance, with hundreds of channels, national media sites, podcasts, newsletters, Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, and media apps. Each of these media sources can reach thousands or millions of people a day. These publishers are broadcasters. Their work isn’t viral at all. To say that an idea “went viral” after it appeared on the New York Times front page is nearly as silly as saying a commercial “went viral” after appearing in the Super Bowl, or saying E. coli “goes viral” when many people get sick eating at the same restaurant. Words have meanings, and even the most elastic definition of virality has nothing to do with such one-to-one-thousand (or one-to-one-hundred-million) events. The spread of a viral video is not mostly viral, but neither is it all broadcast. Rather, the studies of social networks suggest that the majority of viral hits involves one or several mass contamination events that look like this . . . . . . where one Facebook post, one favorable spot on the Drudge Report, or one well-watched segment on Fox News reaches thousands and thousands of people instantaneously, and then a small fraction of that infected group passes it along again. Almost nothing really goes viral, but some ideas and products rea...

Now with more than 150 million sold copies, Fifty Shades of Grey is the bestselling book in the history of Random House.

I’ve come to think that although Fifty Shades has become a poster child of virality, it was really the beneficiary of three distinct one-to-one-million broadcasts.

That is the difference between virality in epidemiology and culture. A real virus spreads only between people. But a “viral” idea can spread between broadcasts. For most so-called viral ideas or products to become massive hits, they almost always depend on several moments where they spread to many, many people from one source. Not like a flu, but rather like a Broad Street water pump.

This is why for Amazon in the early days, any PR was good PR, because our product was great.

Jane Austen’s classic is both an original species and a classic of its genus—the power-inversion metamyth. Many romances follow the same dramatic arc: A powerful man desires the less powerful woman and, by falling in love, loses his dominion, making their union possible. It’s Beauty and the Beast, where the small woman tames the great monster. It’s Jane Eyre, where the rich aloof nobleman melts for the working-class nanny. “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex,” Oscar Wilde said. “Sex is about power.” Fifty Shades is a power struggle, too, one in which sex is the setting for the central inversion of power.

Central story for K-Drama as well. Power inversion using your sex usually seems to involve woman taming a Amanda because of traditional patriarchal structures in society.

Classic literature is despotic, in a way; there is one author of the text, and millions of readers whose only choice is to dutifully follow along. Those authors could seem like distant deities and, as John Updike wrote, “gods do not answer letters.” But in the direct democracy of fan fiction, the readers are writers, the writers are also readers, and they all answer letters. In this peaceful revolution against the sovereignty of authorship, an audience of readers comes together to become each other’s audience—and, once in a while, produces a piece of art that eclipses its influence. Above all, a popular fan fiction writer is a talented reader—of the source material, of her peers’ interpretations, and of her audience’s reception. It’s clear that, even if nobody outside of FanFiction.net ever bought a copy of her books, James was a keen reader of all three groups. On the site, she would spend hours in the comment threads on her stories, absorbing praise, noting suggestions, and welcoming feedback. By her own account, James was exhaustively devoted to staying in touch with her fans. From the beginning, Fifty Shades was a conversation—between Erika Leonard and other fanfic authors, between Snowqueens Icedragon and her tens of thousands of devoted online readers, between E. L. James and her global legion of fans, and finally between the fans themselves. “Conversation is the most powerful thing for selling books, and this book touched off a conversation that women wanted to have...

The mere existence of rankings—the simple signal of popularity—made the biggest hits even bigger.

In a follow-up experiment, Watts and his fellow scientists got a little cheeky: They inverted the rankings. Some visitors went to music sites where the least popular song was falsely listed as number one. You can probably guess what happened. Previously ignored songs initially soared in popularity. Previously popular songs were ignored. Simply believing, even wrongly, that a song was popular made many participants more likely to download it. Rankings created superstars, even when they lied.

Some consumers buy products not because they are “ better” in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.

Humans are social creatures so much of popularity is a social construction

Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

What separated Fifty Shades is that its notoriety became a distinct product; people who didn’t even enjoy reading still wanted to avoid being the last person to have read it.

For many cultural achievements, the art itself is not the only thing worth consuming; the experience of having seen, read, or heard the art for the purpose of being able to talk about it is its own reward. Such consumers are not just buying a product; what they’re really buying is entry into a popular conversation. Popularity is the product.

Information is a nonexcludable resource. When you share something online, you are giving up nothing. In fact, you are gaining something quite valuable: an audience. Sharing, in the context of information, isn’t really sharing. It’s much more like talking.

new kernel of meaning for people.

Compressing big ideas into something dense is key here, like rhetoric

The size of a pinback button limits how much can be said while still being readable . . . When I’m doing my job well, I’m saying something precise about topics that are personal to me or those I’m close to (whether that’s education, existential panic, or my pets, etc.) in a way that is specific enough that it feels personal and relatable to others with the same interests . . . Success is in making a meaningful connection with my audience.

Specificity and familiarity matter. Detail can make the difference between something that feels like it comes from experience (and meaningful) versus something general and passive. I want to be educated enough on a subject to feel like I have something real or new to say. Customers have requested designs for a wide range of subjects, but even if I like the topic, there are a lot of clever people out there and most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Chances are decent that even if a joke feels new to me, it’s played out to the audience most likely to buy it. Knowledge and personal interest don’t guarantee that everything I do is new, but it significantly reduces the risk of retreading old material.

It feels almost impossible to tell what people will respond to. I’ve written a fair amount of hits and at least as many misses, and in most cases it’d be difficult for me to explain why one goes on to be a bestseller and the other a complete failure.

perhaps that’s just it: An inside joke is a private network of understanding. It crystallizes an in-group, a kind of soft cult, where unique individuals feel like they belong. Vincent Forrest’s physical products are buttons and magnets. But what he’s really selling is something else: a sentiment that feels so personal that you simply have to talk about it.

Every time you pass along a piece of information in a social network—online or offline—its ultimate popularity depends on whether your audience decides to tell other people, their audience, about it. You face a simple question: “Is this news right for my audience?” Then your audience applies the same calculation to determine if they should pass it along to their friends: “Is this right for my audience?” And their audience, the audience of your audience, makes the same judgment before telling an entirely separate group of people: “Is this right for my audience?” With each step, the news travels further from its original source. “To make popular content, it’s not enough to know your friends or your followers,” said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist who studies online behavior at Stanford University. “It’s about knowing the friends of your friends and the followers of your followers. For something to go big, it has to be interesting to those beyond your immediate audience—the audience of your audience.” If we share information with the people we’re connected to, another way to ask the question, Why do people share what they share? is to ask, What connects people? Among the most established and consistent principles in the organization of humans is an idea called “homophily.” It’s a funny-looking word that communicates a simple idea: You are like the people around you—your friends, your spouse, your online networks, and your office relationships. There is a related idea, “pr...

Think of women and minorities in technology

Every time you pass along a piece of information in a social network—online or offline—its ultimate popularity depends on whether your audience decides to tell other people, their audience, about it. You face a simple question: “Is this news right for my audience?” Then your audience applies the same calculation to determine if they should pass it along to their friends: “Is this right for my audience?” And their audience, the audience of your audience, makes the same judgment before telling an entirely separate group of people: “Is this right for my audience?” With each step, the news travels further from its original source. “To make popular content, it’s not enough to know your friends or your followers,” said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist who studies online behavior at Stanford University. “It’s about knowing the friends of your friends and the followers of your followers. For something to go big, it has to be interesting to those beyond your immediate audience—the audience of your audience.” If we share information with the people we’re connected to, another way to ask the question, Why do people share what they share? is to ask, What connects people? Among the most established and consistent principles in the organization of humans is an idea called “homophily.” It’s a funny-looking word that communicates a simple idea: You are like the people around you—your friends, your spouse, your online networks, and your office relationships. There is a related idea, “pr...

The power of women seeing Wonder Woman and crying

But broadly speaking, the racial homogeneity of social groups is shocking. The average white American has ninety-one white friends for every black, Asian, or Hispanic friend. The average black American has ten black friends for each white friend. Perhaps the most stunning statistic of interracial friendships is this: In the United States, where the majority of three-year-olds are not white, up to 75 percent of white people cannot name a single “minority” friend.