Individuals of high socioeconomic status are altruistic in sharing money but egoistic in sharing time

The questions of whether and how socioeconomic status (SES) predicts prosocial behavior have sparked an interest from different disciplines, yet experimental evidence is inconclusive. We embedded two types of dictator games in a web survey with 7772 participants from Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the US. Each participant was asked to split a sum of money and a fixed amount of time between themself and a recipient. While higher-SES individuals are more generous than lower-SES individuals in the money game, they are more egoistic in the time game. In addition, the SES of the recipient matters more in the money game than in the time game. These results point towards the relevancy of a situationally contingent social norm of redistribution in studying the relationship between SES and prosocial behavior.publishedVersio

The role of offline ties in online communities : the case of Wikipedia

This thesis investigates the role of offline ties in online communities, taking the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as an example. It uses publicly available data collected from the German Wikipedia to assess whether offline meeting participation affects editors' behaviour in three different domains: 1) productivity and collaboration, 2) norm-relevant behaviour, and 3) election participation. Data was collected on over 4000 meetings covering the period between the creation of the German Wikipedia in 2001 to March 2020. In the first substantive chapter of this thesis, matching meetup attendees with a comparable control group and employing a difference-in-differences design, I find positive and significant effects of meetup attendance on productivity on Wikipedia, measured as the number of edits. In the second substantive chapter, I build upon the theoretical arguments put forward by Coleman (1990) and test whether offline network density influences norm-relevant behaviour. I find only limited importance of the offline network: those attending meetups tend to both experience and conduct fewer norm violations, and they give and receive generally more rewards. However, the density of the offline network does not play a noteworthy role in explaining online norm violation and norm enforcement, except that those in high-density off- line networks generally give fewer rewards. Lastly, for the third substantive chapter, I collected data on all elections for administrators on the German Wikipedia. Using hybrid multilevel random effects models, I find that offline participation measures influence whether one is successful as a candidate, and whether and how one votes. This highlights important processes in situations of public elections. This study is one of the first to bridge the gap between online and offline behaviour, using digital trace data and offline meeting data on a large scale. The findings emphasise how offline interactions in online communities can affect the community and the important role of social capital. They have implications for online communities and Wikimedia in regard to understanding the importance of meetups and (inequality in) access to meetings

Explaining ethnic violence : on the relevance of geographic, social, economic, and political factors in hate crimes on refugees

Many Western societies experience recurring patterns of violence against ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, and other asylum seekers, making it important to better understand which conditions increase (or decrease) the likelihood of hate crimes. In this article, we test the relevance of different geographic, social, economic, and political conditions for attacks on refugees. To this end, we conduct an event-history analysis for Germany between 2014 and 2017, when Germany experienced a sharp rise and subsequent decline in assaults on refugees with up to 142 personal and miscellaneous (such as assaults and insults) and 11 arson attacks on refugee homes and refugees per week. We analyse these incidents at the district level and derive hypotheses from theoretical considerations on geographic proximity, social similarity, political opportunity structures, competition for resources, opportunities of contact with foreigners, and differences between East and West Germany. Irrespective of the type of attack, the results of Cox regression models support our theoretical reasoning on diffusion processes, geographical proximity, and the contact hypothesis. There is no support for the model-adopter similarity and competition-for-resources hypothesis. The type of violence matters with regard to the importance of political opportunity structures and differences between East and West Germany. Our findings show the importance of differentiating between different types of violence and accounting for the context-dependency of ethnic violence for future research

Dataset: Offline meetups on the German-language Wikipedia

Data on all meetups in the German Wikipedia 2001-04/202

Dataset: Elections in the German-language Wikipedia

Data on all elections in the German-language Wikipedia 2001-04/202

Social capital in retirement villages : a literature review

Retirement villages are a model of extra-care housing, offering purpose-designed housing that incorporates both care services and a range of non-care-related facilities and activities. These generate opportunities for formal and informal social activity, and promote community engagement, solidarity between residents, and active and independent ageing. Providers suggest that retirement villages are able to foster an environment rich in social capital. This study's purpose is to review and summarise key findings on the topic of social capital in retirement villages in the gerontological literature. Social capital is defined as both an individual attribute of single actors and a feature of communities as a whole. A clear conceptualisation of social capital is used to organise the reviewed studies along different dimensions: on an individual level, social networks, trustworthiness and obligations are differentiated, while the collective level distinguishes between system control, system trust and system morality. Thirty-four studies are reviewed. While retirement villages are generally described as friendly places with widespread helping behaviour where new friends are made, research has also highlighted the difficulty of socially integrating the frail and very old. While, in particular, social networks and system morality have received much attention, there is a clear need for future research into the other domains of social capital

Does living in districts with higher levels of ethnic violence affect refugees’ attitudes towards the host country? Empirical evidence from Germany

While there are many quantitative studies examining the determinants of ethnic violence from the perspective of offenders, less is known about the effects of violence on the victims or target groups. In light of the increased refugee migration in Germany in 2015/2016, we provide empirical evidence that living in districts with a past of ethnic violence against refugees affects refugees’ perception of the host country negatively. We are using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel which we matched with data on ethnic violence. Albeit refugees had positive attitudes towards Germany – they felt overwhelmingly welcome, safe, and were barely worried about xenophobia – they were considerably less likely to feel this positive in districts with a high accumulated share of arson attacks on refugee homes. As living in contexts with higher levels of past and present ethnic violence can influence refugees’ attitudes, this has implications for integration processes