No abstract

Does exposure to ethnic minorities change the majority's attitudes towards them? We investigate this question using novel panel data on attitudes from a general-population sample in the Netherlands matched to geographical data on refugees. We find that people who live in neighborhoods of refugees for a sufficiently long time acquire a more positive attitude. Instead, people living in municipalities hosting refugees, but not in their close neighborhood, develop a more negative attitude. The positive neighborhood effect is particularly strong for groups that are likely to have personal contact with refugees suggesting that contact with minorities can effectively reduce prejudice.

We examine the effects of refugee resettlement on the trust and attitudes of individuals in host populations. We exploit an exogenous resettlement shock in rural Australia and combine data from a lab‐in‐the‐field experiment with repeated cross‐sectional survey data to test the predictions of three prominent theories about inter‐group contact: contact theory, conflict theory and constrict theory. Surprisingly, our aggregate results reject all of the theories. A split‐sample analysis reveals strong gender effects: females who have experienced contact with resettled refugees are more trusting of refugees generally and also hold significantly more favourable attitudes towards refugee resettlement than males.

No abstract

Based on empirical findings that pro-environmental behaviour occurs less frequently on vacation, we hypothesise that people have an enjoyment-related threshold for displaying pro-environmental behaviours: they display certain behaviours in low enjoyment-focused contexts, such as at home, but not in highly enjoyment-focused (hedonic) contexts, such as on vacation. We test whether a threshold exists after which the desire to enjoy takes precedence over the willingness to act with the environment in mind. The results of our study show that this is not the case. Contrary to the currently dominant paradigm, we find that home habits and effort also drive pro-environmental behaviours, opening new avenues for the design of behaviour change interventions.