Quantifying the Tacit: The Imitation Game and Social Fluency

This article describes a new research method called the Imitation Game. The method is based on the idea of ‘interactional expertise’, which distinguishes discursive performance from practical expertise and can be used to investigate the relationship between groups that diverge culturally or experientially. We explain the theory that underpins the method and report results from a number of empirical trials. These include ‘proof of concept’ research with the colour blind, the blind and those with perfect pitch, as well as Imitation Games on more conventional sociological topics such as the social relationships between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, and active Christians and secular students. These studies demonstrate the potential of the method and its distinctive features. We conclude by suggesting that the Imitation Game could complement existing techniques by providing a new way to compare social relationships across social and temporal distances in both a qualitative and a quantitative way

Sociality in Diverse Societies: A Regional Analysis Across European Countries

For a long time, researchers investigate the impact of diversity on society. To measure diversity, either archival data at the national level of census data at the neighborhood level, within a single country are used. Both approaches are limited. The first approach does not allow to investigate variation in diversity within countries and the second approach misses the possibility to investigate cross national differences. The present study aims at bringing these two approaches closer together by constructing diversity measures based on the European Social Survey (ESS). The ESS is collected every 2 years since 2002 and includes individual level data that allow replicating earlier measures of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity for 30 European countries. Furthermore, since respondents are asked to indicate in what region they live, measured with the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics classification, it is possible to construct disaggregated measures. Comparing the new indicators with existing diversity scores leads to the following conclusions. First, the new and old measures are strongly correlated at the national level. Secondly, investigating the relationship between diversity and different kinds of sociality (interpersonal trust, institutional trust, and support for government redistribution) shows that regional diversity is more strongly related to them than diversity at the national level