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

Abstract

I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. I randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. League players faced variation in collaborative contact, through random assignment to homogeneous-caste or mixed-caste teams, and adversarial contact, through random assignment of opponents. Collaborative contact increases cross-caste friendships and efficiency in trade, and reduces own-caste favoritism. In contrast, adversarial contact generally reduces cross-caste interaction and efficiency. League participation reduces intergroup differences, suggesting that the positive aspects of intergroup contact more than offset the negative aspects in this setting. (JEL C93, D83, D91, J15, O15, Z13, Z21)

Engaging the Arts for Wellbeing in the United States of America: A Scoping Review

“…Community setting was defined to include settings such as community centers, parks, arts facilities, schools, prisons, etc., and to exclude programs taking place in settings such as hospitals, health centers, and long-term care facilities. For this review, a community was considered as a group inhabiting a common geographic place, having one or more common ties, or sharing a common identity-forming narrative ( Hillery, 1982 ; Lowe, 2021 ). Within this definition, it is recognized that communities of people share common geographic areas, including those composed of culturally distinct members and culturally heterogeneous groups.…”

Paradox of diversity in the collective brain

“…Research on contact theory reveals that a collaborative rather than adversarial contact—consistent with positive rather than zero-sum conditions—decreases intergroup differences and hostility [ 181 ]. But the dimensions of cultural difference matter and results on contact theory do not necessarily generalize.…”

Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building

“…The point estimates and standard errors can be seen in online Appendix Table A. 5, which shows that all but a few lower quintile interactions are significantly different at the 1 percent level from the reference villages with very little to no diversity ( i = j = 1 ).…”

“…6 It also provides a window into contemporary debates about national 4 Other recent work on nation building examines how public media (Blouin and Mukand 2016), bureaucrat assignments (Okunogbe 2015), schooling (Bandiera et al forthcoming), shared religious experience (Clingingsmith, Khwaja, and Kremer 2009), and external enemies (Dell and Querubin 2018) influence intergroup tolerance and national identity. 5 This interplay between local and aggregate diversity features in cross-country studies by Zhuravskaya (2011) andDesmet, Gomes, andOrtuño-Ortín (2016) and is an emerging theme in the political science literature covered by Enos (2017). 6 There is comparatively little empirical work on either setting.…”

“…Third, our findings on segregation contribute to a small but growing literature highlighting the important role of physical proximity in mediating the aggregate effects of diversity. 5 Algan, Hémet, and Laitin (2016) also explore sharply local effects of diversity in public apartment blocks in France, arguing that diverse buildings tend to foster social anomie. We differ by focusing on identity and integration, by disentangling F and P , and by clarifying the distinct effect of segregation.…”