Diversity

In this theme I address a persistent puzzle in the social sciences: why do diverse environments hamper the development of civic attitudes?

Manuscript in preparation

At the Free University Brussels I extended insights from my PhD thesis (see below) to an experimental design - minimal group paradigm - in order to overcome causality issues in prior research. This work is in collaboration with Prof. Benny Geys (Norwegian Business School), Dr. Jona Linde (Maastricht Univeristy), and Prof. Bertjan Doosje (University of Amsterdam). To assess the external validity of the experimental data, we are setting up a second study to test these mechanisms beyond our student sample. Draft papers were presented at The 2nd Barcelona-Gothenburg Workshop on Experimental Political Science in 2016 and at The Dutch Political Psychology Conference/Meeting in 2015.

In our working paper, we evaluate the potential learning effects of group membership in a setting where opinion diversity is manipulated. More specifically, we allocated participants to different groups (thus avoiding self-selection concerns), and exposed them to views, which were similar or dissimilar to their own opinions, or a mix of those. The results indicate that exposure to diverse attitudes can affect individuals’ trusting attitudes even in this limited exposure framework, but that opinion certainty and in-group trust play important roles.

Article

While prior research links the creation of generalized trust to intergroup contact, few focus on direct tests of this contact-trust relation outside voluntary organizations. Moreover, most existing studies (in neighborhoods) take the proximity of ethnic groups as evidence of intergroup contact. I therefore set out to examine this in collaboration with Prof. Doosje (University of Amsterdam) and Prof. Benny Geys (Free University Brussels). Published in PLoS ONE (Article).

Intergroup relations theory posits that cross-group friendship reduces threat perceptions and negative emotions about outgroups. This has been argued to mitigate the negative effects of ethnic diversity on generalized trust. Yet, direct tests of this friendship-trust relation, especially including perceptions of threat and negative affect as mediators, have remained rare at the individual level. In this article, we bridge this research gap using representative data from eight European countries (Group-Focused Enmity). We employ structural equation modelling (SEM) to model mediated paths of cross-group friendship on generalized trust via perceptions of threat and negative affect. We find that both the total effect as well as the (mediated) total indirect effect of cross-group friendship on generalized trust are weak when compared with similar paths estimated for prejudice.

Article

By drawing on a representative Dutch sample (Family Survey Dutch Population) I complemented the results of my Ph.D. in a manuscript together with Dr. Maurice Gesthuizen (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Dr. Joshua Holm (Free University Brussels). Published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (Article).

We focused on perceptions of the active participants of voluntary organizations with a Dutch (majority) background. Results are partly in line with my Ph.D. project in that active participants with higher trust levels seem to self-select into diverse organizations (up to 25% diverse). However, when the level of diversity is more tangible (more than 26%) participants that have lengthier duration of engagement have lower trust levels, possibly because they feel threatened. This could be attributed to intergroup conflicts when, within mainstream Dutch organizations, the size of the minority groups becomes noticeable.

PhD thesis

Published by IMSCOE Springer Publishing (Book), Ethnic and Racial Studies (Article), and Journal of Migration and Ethnic Studies (Article).

I surveyed 463 participants and board members of more than 40 non-profit organizations in Amsterdam, some of which are ethnically diverse (bridging) - the so-called “schools of democracy” - and some of which are exclusively Turkish (bonding). My research contributes to a general theory of social and political trust, which moves beyond emphasizing interaction between people who are embedded in ethnically diverse environments (intergroup contact), but also one that includes the importance of cognition.