I have no studies to cite, but in my personal experience, expanding my social circle from almost exclusively a rather ideologically narrow grouping of political activists, to people with whom I shared various other sorts of interests, I became much less defensive about my beliefs and much more capable of revising them, and in fact did so for a number of them. In real time, I perceived this as a consequence of no longer being totally dependent on the first group for my senses of community and identity.