Events

Abstract:  How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? Recent waves of migration have spurred interest in the effects of ethnic diversity in Western societies. While most scholars focus on whether diversity undermines trust and social capital, I build on Durkheim's intuition that solidarity in complex societies derives from interdependence and division of labor rather than cultural similarity and mutual acquaintanceship. I introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure to capture the tension between the human tendency to favor the ingroup and societal pressures that force people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown, diverse others. I present findings from a nationwide lost-letter experiment to document the effects of market integration on prosocial behavior, and results from a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment in the multiethnic city of Milan, to study how Italian natives and immigrants interact with coethnics and non-coethnics. Taken together, these results confirm contact theory intuition that interaction with outgroup members, especially when individuals have common goals, is likely to foster prosociality, while also documenting the persistence of discriminatory behavior in selection processes.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Michaelmas Term is convened by Christiaan Monden and Leo Azzolini.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.