Chinese clustering

Why do people hang out together? Why do they sit next to each-other?
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The Chinese might give us the answer. In the master program that I am in we are quite few students and about a quarter are Chinese. In most courses there are only the six Chinese colleagues from the master program and in one course there is another Chinese student which is a PhD student I guess.
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I realized that the Chinese always manage to cluster and sit next to each-other in class or, in really bad scenarios they form two groups. In the brakes the same thing occurs. The Chinese stay together in one group and the other students… well mingle around, usually without entering the Chinese circle.
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This might sound like a racist conspiracy or some really impolite remarks from someone that is not very sociable. Well, it’s neither of the two. What’s happening is a normal psychological phenomenon.
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One well known fact is that we tend to prefer things that we’ve already know, that are familiar to us. Another fact is that we tend to like the people that are similar to us. Obviously we tend to do things that we like, like sitting next to a person that we like rather than one that we don’t like. We prefer to talk to people that are similar to us because the hallow effect gives us the impression that we share more than just looks. We think that we share common interests and values. It is not always so, but at least till we realize that it is not so. Another criterion that relationships form is common interests or habits. Have you ever realized that smokers tend to hang out together?
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It’s obvious that race is a very salient characteristic, so it’s no wonder why the Chinese tend to hang around together. But as I said before, in one course there is another Chinese colleague that is a PhD student. He is not hanging around with the other Chinese and doesn’t sit with the Chinese group. Why? A first answer is that the group from the master was already formed when the course started. But this raises another question: why doesn’t he join the group now if it is a Chinese group and he is also Chinese? Well, because it’s not necessarily a Chinese group (although it is formed only of Chinese).
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Now let’s talk about something else called random coherence. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it means that we are coherent in our behavior to some thing that was at first more or less random. Let’s say that on the introduction day there were two separate groups – the research master group and the PhD students group and in each group the people get somehow acquainted. The two groups collide in a course that takes place one week after the introduction day. What do you think it’s going to happened? What has happened is that in the classroom PhD students stood on one side and master students stood on the other side. The next week the same arrangement is in place. Same goes on for the next week. What happens in these weeks is that ties are formed between the members of each of the two groups. Friendships begin inside the groups, but very little contact is made between the groups. All of this is mostly due to a random thing – on which introduction day each was on. People believe that their behavior is coherent to something important, but in fact it’s coherent with something random.
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Coming back to the seventh Chinese (the PhD student) we can say that he’s totally coherent. He sticks with the phd students group and keeps the relationships with the people who he already knows even if they are not Chinese and there are other Chinese in the room that he doesn’t know priory.
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This is a brief explanation of the clustering process with a case study on Chinese.
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Now who gains and who loses? The answer for both questions is everybody. The Chinese (in our case) gain because they get the psychological comfort of being part of a group that is homogenous in many aspects. The other students gain because they get a similar comfort in other clusters. Now everybody loses because one of the main advantages of being in an international environment is the opportunity of interacting with people from other cultures. In our case the Chinese lose the most because the other students get to interact with each other and they are heterogeneous, while the Chinese interact most among themselves.