High rates of immigration are a good thing, most economists argue: the mixing of cultures fosters creativity and boosts economic productivity. But a survey in the US shows that greater ethnic diversity may hurt community spirit - in the short term, at least.
This is the conclusion of Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam after studying data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. The survey, carried out in 2000, asked more than 30,000 Americans from widely different communities about how much they trusted each other.
Not surprisingly, Putnam found that levels of trust were generally lower between people of different ethnicity. Social scientists usually assume that such “out group” suspicion goes hand-in-hand with heightened “in group” cohesion. Putnam found otherwise: the level of trust between people of the same ethnicity also fell off with increasing ethnic diversity.
“The inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life and to distrust their neighbours, regardless of their skin colour,” Putnam says.
The survey also showed that people within more diverse communities had fewer close friends, watched more television, had lower expectations of government and community leaders and, perhaps for that reason, voted less. In short, diversity seemed to erode trust and community cohesion (Scandinavian Political Studies, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x). Putnam says that it will take further study to see if the results hold true outside the US.
Evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that loss of trust in the short term, even among people of the same ethnicity, could reflect the challenge that people face in negotiating a rapidly changing social world.
“Evolutionary models suggest that it’s repeated interactions that allow people to make decisions about cooperation,” says Kurzban. “So it could be that as people enter communities, there is little history that establishes links of trust. Any inflow of diverse peoples should tend to disrupt the average amount of trust, although time should restore it.”
“This is an intriguing idea,” says Putnam. He argues that it is important to strengthen shared identities by creating more “opportunities for meaningful interaction across ethnic lines”. -New Scientist
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