Market integration accounts for local variation in generalized altruism in a nationwide lost-letter experiment

What explains variation in levels of prosocial behavior across communities? And are members of the ingroup and outgroup treated differently? According to evolutionary theories of generalized altruism, market integration should lead to greater levels of prosociality: Market exchange forces people to interact with unknown others, thus creating the conditions for the extension of prosocial behavior beyond close-knit circles to include outgroup members and strangers. Moving away from the evolutionary focus on cross-cultural variation, this article uses the market-integration hypothesis to explain intracultural variation in levels of prosociality in an advanced society. Taking advantage of an ideal setting, this study reports results from a large-scale, nationwide lost-letter experiment in which 5,980 letters were dispersed in a sample of 188 Italian communities. The study confirms the relevance of market integration in accounting for differences in levels of prosociality: In areas where market exchange is dominant, return rates are high. It also casts a light on the relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality: Return rates for both Italian and foreign recipients are the same; they vary together; and ingroup returns are highly predictive of outgroup returns at the community level

Dynamics of Political Polarization

This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization, the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization, the fact that while individuals experienced attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characterized by attitude heterogeneity. These paradoxes give rise to numerous scholarly arguments. By deploying a formal model of interpersonal influence over attitudes in a context where individuals hold simultaneous positions on multiple issues we show why these arguments are not mutually exclusive and how they meaningfully refer to the same social setting. It follows that the results from this model provide a single parsimonious account for both paradoxes. The framework we develop may be generalized to a wider array of problems, including classic problems in collective action

Ethnic diversity, poverty and social trust in Germany: evidence from a behavioral measure of trust

Several scholars have concluded that ethnic diversity has negative consequences for social trust. However, recent research has called into question whether ethnic diversity per se has detrimental effects, or whether lower levels of trust in diverse communities simply reflect a higher concentration of less trusting groups, such as poor people, minorities, or immigrants. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of the German population (GSOEP), we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level-specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood-is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, in contrast to the majority of current research on ethnic diversity, we use a behavioral measure of trust in combination with fine-grained (zip-code level) contextual measures of ethnic composition and poverty. Furthermore, we are also able to compare the behavioral measure to a standard attitudinal trust question. We find that household poverty partially accounts for lower levels of trust, and that after controlling for income, German and non-German respondents are equally trusting. However, being surrounded by neighbors with immigrant background is also associated with lower levels of social trust

Ethnic diversity, poverty and social trust in Germany: Evidence from a behavioral measure of trust

Several scholars have concluded that ethnic diversity has negative consequences for social trust. However, recent research has called into question whether ethnic diversity per se has detrimental effects, or whether lower levels of trust in diverse communities simply reflect a higher concentration of less trusting groups, such as poor people, minorities, or immigrants. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of the German population (GSOEP), we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level–specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, in contrast to the majority of current research on ethnic diversity, we use a behavioral measure of trust in combination with fine-grained (zip-code level) contextual measures of ethnic composition and poverty. Furthermore, we are also able to compare the behavioral measure to a standard attitudinal trust question. We find that household poverty partially accounts for lower levels of trust, and that after controlling for income, German and non-German respondents are equally trusting. However, being surrounded by neighbors with immigrant background is also associated with lower levels of social trust

Modernization and Lynching in the New South

Abstract: This article evaluates an emerging body of historical scholarship that challenges prevailing views of the primacy of rural conditions in southern lynching by positing that it was symbiotically associated with the processes of modernization underway in the region in the decades around 1900. Statistical analyses of lynching data that differentiate among events according to communal participation, support, and ceremony in Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930 and local-level indices of modernization (urbanization, rural depopulation, industrialization, agricultural commercialization, and dissolution of traditional family roles) yield results that both support and contradict such a modernization thesis of lynching. The findings imply that the consequences of the social transformation in the South coinciding with the lynching era were not uniform throughout the region with regard to racial conflict and violence and that broad arguments proposing an intrinsic connection between modernization and lynchings therefore are overstated

Estilo lingüístico y prosocialidad en un contexto político en Twitter

El comportamiento prosocial ha sido explicado desde diferentes modelos con el propósito de comprender por qué las personas realizan conductas que benefician a otras de manera voluntaria (Barreto, López y Borja, 2015). El comportamiento prosocial contribuye, en algunos casos, a disminuir comportamientos de racismo, indiferencia social, exclusión y agresividad, entre otros fenómenos del comportamiento antisocial. La teoría evolucionista y las teorías sociales son algunos de los modelos explicativos que tienen más evidencia a favor. Desde la perspectiva evolucionista, se explica la aparición del comportamiento prosocial como una forma de garantizar la supervivencia de la especie, mediante comportamientos cooperativos en los que prevalece el interés a favor de la especie, sobre el individual con el fin de que la información genética sea transmitida de generación en generación (Guijo, 2002).1a edició