How loose social ties can help heal political division | Eva M Meyersson Milgrom

The first time a woman I’ll call Shoshana went toBrandi Carlile’s music festival, she arrived alone. She had just been through another unsuccessful round of IVF. During one of the songs, about motherhood, she began to cry in the middle of the crowd. Then two women she had never met stepped closer and wordlessly wrapped their arms around her until her breathing slowed.

“That’s when I realized,” Shoshana told me in an interview, “this place isn’t just about music.”

Over the next five days, Shoshana would meet dozens of people she would never otherwise have crossed paths with – women from different parts of the world with different life stories. She was doing something most of us are never taught to do: she was connecting to what I call a social pipeline, a loosely connected group of weak ties.

Research, notably Mark Granovetter’s work, has consistently demonstrated the significant impact of weak social ties. In fact, major opportunities – such as jobs, breakthrough ideas, new paths and life-altering connections – typically originate not from our closest friends, but from acquaintances, near-strangers, and people in different social circles. These are what we call our weak ties.

But not all weak ties are created equal. As a sociologist who studies social networks, I have found that the ties that really matter are bridge ties – these are connections that take us into new social spheres where we know no one at all. They cross the boundaries that normally structure our lives: age and gender, work and class, culture and politics, belief and life stage.

Imagine someone in your running club who happens to introduce you to a group of board game enthusiasts, whom you’ve never met before: the bridge tie’s introduction enables you to explore an interest you’ve never been able to develop. In this way, our bridge ties don’t just expand our social circles; they change what we believe is possible, in our lives and in the world. And yet we barely notice them.

Shoshana’s annual ritual of going to the music festival gave her access to a constantly changing social pipeline where she makes new connections along with people she meets year after year. Some remain friendly strangers, while other relationships deepen in unexpected ways. For example, she has become part of informal music circles that nurture her love of singing. She helped a festival friend through a painful breakup just as others comforted her when she needed help. Many of these ties never become close friendships. That’s not the point. “They don’t demand my whole life,” Shoshana later told me. “But they give me access to a larger one.”

Bridge ties matter not only because they widen our social reach, but also because they make us more resilient. When we need advice, our bridge ties tell us what they actually think, not what we want to hear – because they have less of a stake in pleasing us. If they are able to support us, they tend to do so freely without expecting anything in return. They help us through life’s big transitions when we are forced to make new connections, from landing a new job to moving to a new city to retirement. They do all this good work in our lives without making demands on our time or seeking our commitment.

Contrast this with your tight-knit circle of friends – perhaps your kids become friends with their children and you even take vacations together. In such settings, where everyone knows everyone else, your entire social world is built on sameness. A difference of opinion can be perceived as wrong and even dangerous. A single conflict can unravel your entire social life, leaving you alone. When our social ties overlap too much, we don’t just lose a friend, we lose access to our entire social world.

This fragility of our social networks helps explain why today’s extreme political polarization, which has turned violent, feels so personal: we no longer have social lives that can absorb disagreement. That’s because we lack the connective tissue of bridge ties that make difference and disagreement survivable.

By bringing us into contact with others through shared interests rather than shared beliefs, our bridge ties allow us to see others in multidimensional ways rather than as representatives of a single political, cultural or religious category. They teach us how to practice living with difference by cultivating familiarity across our differences. So, we become more tolerant and politically resilient as well.

We can see this in action in the largely nonviolent resistance in cities like Minneapolis, where diverse networks of people, who are very loosely connected, have deliberately come together to resist ICE operations and support immigrants and Black and brown residents, from delivering meals to alerting people about ICE activity, and documenting violence. What makes these improvised networks so powerful is precisely the protesters’ ability to stand up for their neighbors across lines of culture, class, politics and faith.

Their actions evoke what Dr Martin Luther King said in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality … Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” King was speaking about justice, but I believe he was also describing a social structure based not on sameness or tribal loyalty, but on integrating with people who are different from us. In an era of division, cultivating bridge ties is not a soft social skill. It is essential civic infrastructure – our lives and democracies depend on it.

What’s giving me hope now

I find hope in powerful examples of collaboration. In Minneapolis, a white Jewish congregation and a largely Latino Lutheran church held joint prayer services amid ICE operations. Members provided food, medicine and transport to Latino and Somali immigrants, sharing risk and offering protection to those targeted by ICE. Similarly, I am moved by how the Israeli human rights organization Rabbis for Human Rights mobilizes volunteers each year to protect Palestinian farmers who work in their fields during the olive harvest. Personally, through my Palestinian former daughter-in-law, I’ve gained firsthand insight into the living conditions in Gaza and found ways to offer my support. These instances underscore how our “bridge ties” connect us with profoundly different social worlds, allowing essential resources, ideas and understanding to flow between them.

• Eva M Meyersson Milgrom is a social scientist and professor emerita from Stanford University, where she was affiliated with the department of sociology, the Institute of Economic Policy, and the Graduate School of Business. She is working on a book on the importance of diversifying our social networks