Ishika Gupta didn’t know anyone when she arrived at Duke as a first-year student. So, when she learned that the university had a mandatory random roommate policy for incoming first-year students, she saw it as an opportunity to meet new people from different backgrounds.
“One of the reasons why I loved it is that my roommate was an engineering student, so there was no reason for us to ever meet at Duke except because of the random policy. I feel that because of it I got to meet her,” said Gupta, who at the time was a pre-med student. Today, she is a research tech in the White-McGarrah Lab in Duke’s Molecular Physiology Institute.
The policy, launched in 2018 with the goal of giving students more chances to meet others from various backgrounds, became the subject of a study conducted by Sarah Gaither, Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor of psychology and neuroscience. The findings, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest that the randomized roommate assignment is a promising way for universities to promote cross-race contact and increase diversity in friend networks.
Gaither started researching random roommate policies while a graduate student at Tufts University, where she earned her Ph.D. in social psychology. Her interest lies in her experience growing up in a mixed-race household.
Gaither’s research at Tufts invited white students who lived with someone from a different racial background to the lab to meet a Black individual they had never met before. The work showed that these interactions went much more positively for both students when the white student had lived with someone from a different race.
You can learn from your roommate and see what their interests are, and maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.Ishika Gupta
When Duke’s random roommate policy was instituted, not everyone was sold on the idea. Some students pushed back. That prompted Duke to reach out to Gaither.
“Since they knew I had done that work as a grad student, as they were deciding on the policy change, they reached out to me to ask if I would like to work with Duke and try to assess data points behind the policy change,” Gaither said.
As a postdoctoral researcher in Gaither’s lab, Analia Albuja, Ph.D., now an assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern University, broke the analysis into three parts: The first part used university survey data from students before the random roommate policy took effect. At that time, about 50 percent of students chose to be randomly assigned. The second group of students was surveyed after the policy was put into place. That resulted in a significant increase in the likelihood of students being assigned to someone from another racial group.
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