Creative Class

Writing in today’s NYT Magazine, Erica Goode summarizes Robert Putnam’s recent research on diversity and social capital:

What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or
town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form
fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home
watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood
barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide
telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group
division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June
issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial
language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to
‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

The full story after the jump.

Putnam’s new work is more complex than previously, showing evidence of clear benefits from diversity. And there is overlap between his notion of bridging social capital and my team’s work on diversity, which he clearly notes: “Diversity has clear benefits, Putnam says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people like me, who are in favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.

There are lots of reasons which could account for this association between places with high levels of diversity and high levels of social isolation. One that reflects recent work of my team is that places with high levels of diversity also have high levels of migration. High levels of migration make it harder to forge trust.  Moreover, our hunch is that migrants reflect particular kinds of personality types which are more likely to seek out new experiences and less likely to be rooted in personal relationships.

What do you think?

For decades, students of American society have offered dueling
theories about how encountering racial and ethnic diversity affects the
way we live. One says that simple contact — being tossed into a stew of
different cultures, values, languages and styles of dress — is likely
to nourish tolerance and trust. Familiarity, in this view, trumps
insularity. Others argue that just throwing people together is rarely
enough to breed solidarity: when diversity increases, they assert,
people tend to stick to their own groups and distrust those who are
different from them.

But what if diversity had an even more complex and pervasive effect?
What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or
town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who
looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form
fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home
watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood
barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide
telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group
division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June
issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial
language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to
‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In highly diverse cities and towns like Los Angeles, Houston and
Yakima, Wash., the survey found, the residents were about half as
likely to trust people of other races as in homogenous places like
Fremont, Mich., or rural South Dakota, where, Putnam noted, “diversity
means inviting a few Norwegians to the annual Swedish picnic.”

More significant, they were also half as likely to trust people of
their own race. They claimed fewer close friends. They were more apt to
agree that “television is my most important form of entertainment.”
They had less confidence in local government and less confidence in
their own ability to exert political influence. They were more likely
to join protest marches but less likely to register to vote. They rated
their happiness as generally lower. And this diversity effect continued
to show up even when a community’s population density, average income,
crime levels, rates of home ownership and a host of other factors were
taken into account.

It was not a result that Putnam, the author of the much-discussed
2000 book “Bowling Alone,” was looking for when he sat down six years
ago to examine the mass of data he had collected. He was hoping to
build on his earlier work, which described a precipitous decline in the
nation’s “social capital,” the formal and informal networks — bowling
leagues, parent-teacher associations, fraternal organizations, pick-up
basketball games, youth service groups — that tie people together,
shore up civic engagement and forge bonds of trust and reciprocity. Now
he wanted to find out more about how social capital varied regionally
and over time.

But the diversity finding was so surprising that Putnam said his
first thought was that maybe something was wrong with the data. He and
his research team spent five years testing other explanations. Maybe
people in more diverse areas had less political clout and thus fewer
amenities, like playgrounds and pothole-free streets, putting them in a
misanthropic mood; or maybe diversity caused “hunkering down” only in
people who were older or richer or white or female. But the effect did
not go away. When colleagues who heard about the results protested, “I
bet you haven’t thought about X” — a frequent occurrence, Putnam said —
the researchers went back and looked at X.

The idea that it is diversity (the researchers used the census’s
standard racial categories to define diversity) that drives social
capital down has its critics. Among them is Steven Durlauf, an
economist at the University of Wisconsin
and a critic of Putnam’s past work, who said he thinks some other
characteristic, as yet unidentified, explains the lowered trust and
social withdrawal of people living in diverse areas. But without clear
evidence to the contrary, Putnam says, he has to believe the conclusion
is solid.

Few would question that it is provocative. The public discourse on
diversity runs at a high temperature. Told by one side, the narrative
of how different ethnic and racial groups come together in schools,
workplaces, churches and shopping centers can sound as if it was lifted
from “Sesame Street.” Told by the other, it often carries the shrill
tones of a recent caller to a radio talk show on immigration reform:
“The school my kid goes to is 45 percent Mexican,” he said, “and I
don’t see this as being a good thing for this country. Do we want to
turn into a Latin American country?”

Putnam’s argument is more nuanced. Diversity has clear benefits, he
says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more
top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference
is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people like me, who are in
favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it
takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.

Why that discomfort seems to translate into social isolation and a
weakening of civic bonds remains anyone’s guess. Studies by Wendy Berry
Mendes, a social psychologist at Harvard, and her colleagues find that
when research subjects play a cooperative game with someone of another
race, they can show physiological signs of distress — reduced cardiac
efficiency and arterial constriction, for example. On a daily basis,
this alarmed reaction might make people pull inward. Putnam himself
speculates that, with kaleidoscopic changes going on around them,
people in diverse communities might experience a kind of system
overload, shutting down “in the presence of confusing or multiple
messages from the environment.”

Still, in Putnam’s view, the findings are neither cause for despair
nor a brief against diversity. If this country’s history is any guide,
what people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing — what they see as
“other” — can and does change over time. Seemingly intractable group
divisions can give way to a larger, overarching identity. When he was
in high school in the 1950s, Putnam notes, he knew the religion of
almost every one of the 150 students in his class. At the time,
religious intermarriage was uncommon, and knowing whether a potential
mate was a Methodist, a Catholic or a Jew was crucial information. Half
a century later, for most Americans, the importance of religion as a
mating test has dwindled to near irrelevance, “hardly more important
than left- or right-handedness to romance.”

The rising marriage rates across racial and ethnic lines in a
younger generation, raised in a more diverse world, suggest the current
markers of difference can also fade in salience. In some places, they
already have: soldiers have more interracial friendships than
civilians, Putnam’s research finds, and evangelical churches in the
South show high rates of racial integration. “If you’re asking me if,
in the long run, I’m optimistic,” Putnam says, “the answer is yes.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Globalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.