Shocking Racial Attitudes: Black G.I.s in Europe

Abstract

Can attitudes towards minorities, an important cultural trait, be changed? We show that the presence of African American soldiers in the U.K. during World War II reduced anti-minority prejudice, a result of the positive interactions which took place between soldiers and the local population. The change has been persistent: in locations in which more African American soldiers were posted there are fewer members of and voters for the U.K.’s leading far-right party, less implicit bias against blacks and fewer individuals professing racial prejudice, all measured around 2010. Our results point towards intergenerational transmission from parents to children as the most likely explanation.

The Immigrant Next Door: Exposure, Prejudice, and Altruism

“…10 Our work instead uses the implicit attitudes as an outcome and provides novel evidence that implicit bias can be shaped by long-term exposure to out-groups, complementing recent work in other contexts (e.g. Lowes et al 2015Lowes et al , 2017Schindler and Westcott 2020). Moreover, our findings also provide additional validation of IAT scores as a measure of bias, given the robust county-level correlation we observe between IAT scores and measures of explicit bias and between IAT scores and revealed altruism.…”

Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration

“…This paper is the first to systematically test for the effects of different types of contact (Bertrand and Duflo (2017); Paluck et al (2018); Kremer et al (2019)), showing both the importance of common goals, and some suggestive evidence against the importance of intergroup cooperation and equal status. Existing empirical tests study one type of contact in isolation (Boisjoly et al (2006); Barnhardt (2009); Enos (2014); Burns et al (2015); Schindler and Westcott (2015); Broockman and Kalla (2016); Finseraas et al (2016); Mo and Conn (2018); Okunogbe (2018); Scacco and Warren (2018); Stegmann (2018); Carrell et al (2019); Finseraas et al (2019); Mousa (2019)), or use non-randomized variation in the type of contact (Pettigrew and Tropp (2006); Dustmann et al (2018); Bazzi et al (2019)). 9 In a particularly creative example of the former, Rao (2019) shows that integration of rich and poor students in Delhi schools increases the pro-social behavior of rich students.…”

Exposure to Refugees and Voting for the Far-Right: (Unexpected) Results from Austria

“…While most of this literature is confined to studying associations without causal interpretation or small-scale experiments, more recent literature tries to identify causal effects of contact in attitudes towards minorities. For example,Schindler and Westcott (2015) show that membership in the British National Party is lower in British regions where a larger share of black GIs was stationed during WWII.…”