Sharon Barnhardt, who is on the job market from Harvard, reports:
This paper provides experimental evidence on whether religiously diverse neighbors affect attitudes about another religious group and/or preferences for inter-religious living. I exploit a natural experiment in a large Indian city in which Hindus and Muslims were randomly assigned units in a public housing complex with physically distinct "clusters" of four units. The lottery generates exogenous variation in the degree of ethnic diversity across clusters within the complex, which is rare among adult households. I conduct an original survey of 1363 households focusing on attitudes about members of the other religion and willingness to live together. To overcome concerns about self-presentation bias, I also measure implicit attitudes via an Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a representative sub-sample. My estimates demonstrate location influences interactions in that individuals spend significant time with others in their cluster. Increased proximity and interaction, in turn, affect attitudes. Greater exposure to Muslims (the minority group) improves Hindus' explicit attitudes about Muslims by 0.25 to 0.40 standard deviations, depending on the measure, and increases their willingness to live with Muslims. Paralleling this, I observe significant reductions in implicit bias (0.20 to 0.57 standard deviations) among Hindu children. While I observe no significant effects for Muslims, the overall effect is a convergence of attitudes across religious groups. As India expands public housing for the poor to accommodate rapid urbanization, deliberate mixing of religious groups can be a way of improving attitudes toward the religious minority.
You can find the paper, along with her other work, here.
There is a slightly different, more specific and more disconcerting conclusion that one could draw from that abstract.
My assumption (not having read the paper) would be that as the minority, Muslims come into frequent contact with Hindus anyway.
While Hindus may not regularly meet Muslims – meaning that the additional regular contact would make more difference for them.
This is consistent with other randomnization studies. If things are assigned randomnly, per game theory, there is no incentive or ability to form cliques or coalitions against a minority. Less likely to tip.
For the first 23 years of my life (until
1960) I lived in Hyderabad, and knew a fair
number of Muslims as teachers, fellow-
students, friends. While there were
prejudices and preconceptions on both sides,
we got along fairly well, despite sporadic
ugly episodes.
Until 1948 Hyderabad was a “Muslim” state,
with Urdu as the official language and an
Islamic calendar. Many Hindus spoke Urdu,
and assimilated into Muslim culture to a
significant extent. The city (apart from
the old city, which was exclusively Muslim)
had an urbane atmosphere.
HappyJuggler, I hope you are not assuming that country side is homogeneous and cities are not.
My native place, a tiny village in coastal Andhra Pradesh, is about 40% Muslim. And more Muslims come to the temples in the village than Hindus. OTOH, housing-wise, they are not “randomly mixed-up” as in this paper: Muslims mostly live in one area of the village.
So, what does this say about universities randomly assigning roommates during the first year of class rather than allowing students to pick roommates and the dorms they want to live in based on the interests of their inhabitants? If you assign housing randomly in the first year and do not permit off campus living, will students be more loyal to the university than if you had permitted them to sign up the first year with a fraternity/sorority and live off campus?
Bet you never thought you were being manipulated by random assignment policies and policies prohibiting choice.
Let’s see… the paper reports the Hindus are more tolerant than the Moslems. Why am I not surprised that the polytheists who constitute a large political majority are more tolerant than the monotheists who constitute a (disgruntled) political minority?
Singapore has been doing this for decades – with mixed results.
http://usj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/8/1347
Oh Maynard, you lost soul… Why must you aim that venom at “Republicans?” Perhaps you mean ‘conservatives?’ It seems that you, like all card-carrying liberals, have a socialistic objective. Why not allow the freedom to develop friendships that are not fostered and forced, but rather derived naturally from normal human behaviors and desires? Did we not learn from the mistakes of the guy named Hitler? Social engineering is a dangerous practice, and this “experiment” is nothing less than the author’s justification of that practice. In your rush to have the government create POSITIVE EXTERNALITIES through this social engineering, you ignore the fact that you, (or some other liberal of YOUR CHOICE) will need to be the one to decide who lives where, when, how…etc. I think most forethinking people would agree that we don’t want a government entity to make those decisions.
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