General intelligence in friendship selection: A study of preadolescent best friend dyads

•A growing line of work has been devoted to examining peer similarity.•Some evidence exists suggesting peers assort on measures of intelligence.•A need remains to test this idea with large, psychometrically sound datasets.•Our results provide evidence of peer assortment based on intelligence.

Research on the topics of general intelligence and friendship formation separately has elicited a tremendous amount of attention across decades of psychological scholarship. To date, however, less effort has been aimed at uniting these lines of inquiry. In particular, do friendship bonds emerge, based in part, on shared levels of cognitive ability? Several disparate lines of evidence suggest this might be the case, however, a need remains to replicate this work using large national samples coupled with psychometrically sound measurement. The current study helps to fill this void in the literature using a national sample of American children. Our results reveal that preadolescent friendship dyads are robustly correlated on measures of general intelligence, and the effects withstand correction for potentially confounding variables.