Tag Archives | Trust

Prosociality Beyond In-Group Boundaries: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Selection and Intergroup Interactions in a Multiethnic European Metropolis

Delia Baldassarri, Johanna Gereke, Max Schaub

Sociological Science September 6, 2024
10.15195/v11.a30


How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown diverse others and the tendency toward homophily and in-group favoritism. We introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure that includes macrostructural conditions for intergroup encounters and microlevel dynamics of intergroup selection and interaction. Using lab-in-the-field experiments with a large representative sample of Italian natives and immigrants from the multiethnic city of Milan, we find that, when pushed to interact with non-coethnics, Italians generally treat them similarly to how they treat coethnics and value signs of social and market integration. However, when given the opportunity to select their interaction partners, Italians favor coethnics over immigrants. Taken together, these results help reconcile classical findings concerning the positive effects of intergroup contact with evidence documenting the persistence of out-group discrimination in selection processes.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Delia Baldassarri: Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University and Senior Researcher, Dondena Center, Bocconi University
E-mail: delia.b@nyu.edu

Johanna Gereke: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim
E-mail: johanna.gereke@uni-mannheim.de

Max Schaub: Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Hamburg
E-mail: max.schaub@uni-hamburg.de

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Maria Abascal, Shannon Rieger, Merlin Schaeffer, Nan Zhang, and Diego Gambetta as well as several seminar participants for their valuable comments. Funding from ERC Starting Grant 639284. Direct correspondence to Delia Baldassarri, 383 Lafayette Street, Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY, 10012 (delia.b@nyu.edu).

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and code for replication are available at OSF https://osf.io/3rzgj.

  • Citation: Baldassarri, Delia, Johanna Gereke, and Max Schaub. 2024. “Prosociality Beyond In-Group Boundaries: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Selection and Intergroup Interactions in a Multiethnic European Metropolis.” Sociological Science 11: 815-853.
  • Received: June 14, 2024
  • Accepted: August 5, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Ray Reagans
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a30


0

Layered Legacies. How Multiple Histories Shaped the Attitudes of Contemporary Europeans

Andreas Wimmer

Sociological Science February 23, 2023
10.15195/v10.a1


This article introduces the concept of multiple, layered, and interacting histories, which opens four new avenues of research. We can ask which types of institutions or events, such as states, religions, or war, are more likely to leave a historical legacy. We can also explore why only certain states, religions, or wars leave legacies. We can compare the consequences of older and newer layers of history, such as of a series of successor states. Finally, these layers may interact with each other by preserving, neutralizing, or amplifying each other’s effects. To illustrate these new research avenues, I use measurements of value orientations as well as generalized trust from the European Social Survey as dependent variables. New data on the history of states as well as the wars fought since 1500 are combined with existing data on the medieval policies of the Church, all coded at the level of 411 European regions. A series of regression models suggests that the political history of states is more consequential for contemporary attitudes than medieval religious policies or wars, that older layers of states can be as impactful as more recent ones, that interactions between layers are frequent, and that modern nation-states are more likely to leave a legacy than other types of polities.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andreas Wimmer: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: andreas.wimmer@columbia.edu

Acknowledgments: I thank Berenike Firestone and Jiyeon Chang for outstanding research assistance in creating the political history data set and for comments on a first draft; Thomas Soehl and Ka U Ng for assembling a merged data set with the ESS variables; Flavien Ganther for guidance on how to describe the statistical models; SangWon Han as well as Jack la Violette for creating the geocoded battlefield data set; and Sidney Hemming for encouraging my use of geological metaphors.

  • Citation: Wimmer, Andreas. 2023. “Layered Legacies. How Multiple Histories Shaped the Attitudes of Contemporary Europeans.” Sociological Science 10:1-46.
  • Received: June 26, 2022
  • Accepted: August 24, 2022
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a1


0

Bounded Solidarity in Cross-National Encounters: Individuals Share More with Others from Poor Countries but Trust Them Less

Felix Bader, Marc Keuschnigg

Sociological Science September 8, 2020
10.15195/v7.a17


Globalization makes cross-national encounters increasingly common. Hesitant cooperation across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, however, undercuts the microlevel stabilizers of global integration and, most importantly, the willingness to share with and place trust in members of other social groups. In a 109-country online experiment, we convey information on interaction partners’ nationalities to indicate membership in a broader in- or out-group, cultural distance, and perceived material neediness—or status differences more generally—to 1,674 participants in incentivized games of generosity (dictator game) and trust (trust game). We find consistent evidence for in-group favoritism and—against this benchmark—demonstrate that individuals across the globe share more with but place less trust in interaction partners from poor countries and that cultural distance moderates this status effect.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Felix Bader: Department of Social Sciences, Technical University of Kaiserslautern
E-mail: felix.bader@sowi.uni-kl.de

Marc Keuschnigg: Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
E-mail: marc.keuschnigg@liu.se

Acknowledgments: We thank Hanna Nau, Leona Przechomski, and Fabian Thiel for excellent research assistance and Amelie Aidenberger, Johanna Gereke, Wojtek Przepiorka, and Heiko Rauhut for discussions. This research received funding from the German Research Foundation (KE 2020/2-1). M.K. further acknowledges the Swedish Research Council (2018-05170). Address correspondence to felix.bader@sowi.uni-kl.de.

  • Citation: Bader, Felix, and Marc Keuschnigg. 2020. “Bounded Solidarity in Cross-National Encounters: Individuals Share More with Others from Poor Countries but Trust Them Less.” Sociological Science 7: 415-432.
  • Received: June 5, 2020
  • Accepted: July 22, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a17


0

Sharing Compromising Information as a Cooperative Strategy

Diego Gambetta, Wojtek Przepiorka

Sociological Science, May 8, 2019
10.15195/v6.a14


Well-enforced norms create an opportunity for norm breakers to cooperate in ventures requiring trust. This is realized when norm breakers, by sharing evidence of their breaches, make themselves vulnerable to denunciation and therefore trustworthy. The sharing of compromising information (SCI) is a strategy employed by criminals, politicians, and other actors wary of their partners’ trustworthiness in which the cost of ensuring compliance is offloaded on clueless norm enforcers. Here we introduce SCI as a sui generis cooperative strategy and test its functioning experimentally. In our experiment, subjects first acquire the label “dove” or “hawk” depending on how cooperative or uncooperative they are, respectively. Hawks acquire compromising information embodied in their label and can reveal it before an interaction with trust at stake. Unlike doves, hawks who reveal their label make themselves vulnerable to their partners, who can inflict a penalty on them after interaction. We find that even students in as artificial a setting as a computerized decision laboratory grasp the advantage of SCI and use it to cooperate. Our results corroborate the idea that compromising information can be conceived as a “hostage” that, when mutually exchanged, makes each party to the interaction vulnerable and therefore trustworthy in joint endeavours.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Diego Gambetta: Collegio Carlo Alberto, Università di Torino
E-mail: diego.gambetta@carloalberto.org

Wojtek Przepiorka: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: w.przepiorka@uu.nl

Acknowledgements: Both authors contributed equally to this work and thank Ozan Aksoy, Maria Bigoni, Manfred Milinski, and Werner Raub for their helpful comments on earlier versions. D. G. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Research Council of the European University Institute.

  • Citation: Gambetta, Diego, and Wojtek Przepiorka. 2019. “Sharing Compromising Information as a Cooperative Strategy.” Sociological Science 6: 352-379.
  • Received: February 20, 2019
  • Accepted: March 20, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a14


0

Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

Malcolm Fairbrother

Sociological Science, June 8, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a17

Worldwide, most people share scientists’ concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution. Why? I show that this puzzling gap between the public’s positive concerns and normative preferences is due substantially to a lack of trust, particularly political trust. In multilevel models fitted to two international survey datasets, trust strongly predicts support for environmental protection within countries and, by some measures, among countries also. An influential competing theory holds that environmental attitudes correlate mostly with left versus right political ideology; the results here, however, show that this correlation is weaker and varies substantially from country to country—unlike that with trust. Theoretically, these results reflect that environmental degradation is a collective action problem and environmental protection a public good. Methodologically, they derive from the more flexible application of multilevel modeling techniques than in previous studies using such models.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Malcolm Fairbrother: School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute, Centre for Multilevel Modelling, University of Bristol
Email: ggmhf@bristol.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Diego Miralles, Laura De Vito, Jan Mewes, and Jonas Edlund for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, and audiences at the Institute for Futures Studies (Stockholm), Umeå University, Örebro University, Gothenburg University, Stockholm University, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research (Essex) for many constructive suggestions and criticisms. The research on which the article is based was funded in part by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfonds (Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, project number NHS14-2035:1), and a Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol.

  • Citation: Fairbrother, Malcolm. 2016. “Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts.” Sociological Science 3: 359-382.
  • Received: March 3, 2016
  • Accepted: March 13, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a17


0

Birds of Different Feathers Cooperate Together: No Evidence for Altruism Homophily in Networks

Brent Simpson, Matthew Brashears, Eric Gladstone, Ashley Harrell

Sociological Science, December 22, 2014
DOI 10.15195/v1.a30

Many evolutionary models of cooperation assume that altruists possess telltale signs of disposition that they use to find and selectively associate with each other. Prior research finds that people can detect these signs of altruism in strangers, but we do not yet know whether this results in altruism homophily. We argue that dispositions should matter less in repeated interactions, where behavior is based on reciprocity. As a consequence, we should not expect people to have accurate insight into the dispositions (egoism vs. altruism) of their friends, nor should we expect these relations to be characterized by altruism homophily. Three studies, employing diverse methodologies and measures, find no evidence of altruism homophily. Moreover, we find that people have poor insight into their friends’ altruism. We discuss the implications of these findings for the emergence of altruism and the role of embedded interactions in sustaining human cooperation.
Brent Simpson: University of South Carolina  E-mail: bts@sc.edu

Matthew Brashears: Cornell University  E-mail: meb299@cornell.edu

Eric Gladstone: Cornell University Email: eg366@cornell.edu

Ashley Harrell: University of South Carolina Email: harrella@mailbox.sc.edu

  • Citation: Simpson, Brent, Matthew Brashears, Eric Gladstone, and Ashley Harrell. 2014. “Birds of Different Feathers Cooperate Together: No Evidence for Altruism Homophily in Networks.” Sociological Science 1: 542-564.
  • Received: September 4, 2014
  • Accepted: October 11, 2014
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen,  Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v1.a30

0
SiteLock