A Pew Research Center survey of adults in 11 nations across four global regions
finds that, in many key respects,
smartphone users
– especially those who use social media –
are more regularly exposed to people who have different backgrounds and more connected with friends they don’t see in person.
Those with smartphones are also more likely to have accessed new information about health and government services.
Across every country surveyed,
those who use smartphones
are more likely than those who use less sophisticated phones or no phones at all to regularly interact with people from different religious groups.
For example, 57% of Mexican smartphone users report frequently or occasionally interacting with people of other religions, compared with 38% of those with less mobile connectivity.
Across most of the 11 emerging economies, people with smartphones
also tend to be more likely to interact regularly with people from different political parties, income levels and racial or ethnic backgrounds.
Taking Mexico as the example once again,
more than half of Mexican smartphone users (54%) regularly interact with people who support different political parties than they do, compared with 30% of those without smartphones.
They are also 24 percentage points more likely to interact with people of different income levels and 17 points more likely to interact with people of different racial or ethnic groups.
Pew Research Center