Trust, Ethnic Diversity, and Personal Contact: A Field Experiment

Leader Identity and Coordination

“…We find that intergroup contact improves minimum group effort under both Muslim and Hindu leaders compared to the control group, but the difference is larger for Hindu leaders. For Muslim leaders, intergroup contact increases minimum group effort by an additional 1.007 hours compared to the control group, but this difference is not statistically significant ( (Rao, 2019, Finseraas et al 2020, Paluck et al, 2019.…”

An exploration of trust, betrayal, & social identity

“…On the one hand, according to contact theory, personal contact with outgroup members can reduce prejudice and increase trust under the following conditions (Allport, 1954;Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006;Pettigrew et al, 2011): equal status, shared common goals, a cooperative setting, some form of authority, and friendship potential (summarized by Finseraas et al, 2019). If these conditions are met, exposure to people of different races and social backgrounds in childhood can lead to a more racially diverse friend group later in life.…”

“…On a more positive note, recent empirical evidence shows that beliefs about members of other racial or ethnic groups evolve with contact and integration (Boisjoly et al, 2006;Finseraas et al, 2019;Rao, 2019;Schindler and Westcott, 2020;Lowe, 2021;Steinmayr, 2021;Corno et al, 2022) and that intergroup trust can be built even after ethnic conflict (Mousa, 2020). Exposure to diversity at an early age can create a common culture that leads to less redistributional conflict among social groups later in life and may reduce transaction costs between individuals from different social groups, by diminishing the social distance between them or by changing their beliefs about members of other groups Justman, 2000, 2002).…”