Scientific American: Rising Ethnic Diversity Increases Whites’ Fears

Evidence from social science seems to both refute and support the idea that greater ethnic diversity leads to increased feelings of threat amongst Whites. Proponents of “contact theory” claim that increasing levels of diversity within a community actually reduces prejudice. When Whites are able to build personal relationships with people belonging to a particular ethnic group, and get to know them as close friends or neighbors, contact theory predicts that they will develop a more positive view of members of that ethnic group. However, other studies, such as a famous paper by Harvard’s Robert Putnam, seem to support “threat theory”: as Whites have increasing contact with members of other ethnic groups, they tend to withdraw from their communities and become less trusting of people belonging to other ethnicities.

Until now, these two theories have competed with each other, leaving a lack of clarity about the degree to which ethnic diversity truly leads Whites to feel more threatened. A recently published paper by political scientists Eric Kaufmann and Matthew Goodwin attempts to reconcile these two theories and determine conclusively which one is actually correct. They found that the relationship between ethnic diversity and feelings of threats amongst native-born Whites is mixed: for small communities, contact seems to reduce threat, while in larger communities, more diversity seems to increase it. This suggests that increasing diversity by itself does not necessarily lead to greater wariness amongst Whites; diversity interacts with the size of a community in producing threatened feelings. [...]

Perhaps contact theory is only true in smaller sized neighborhoods because that is where people are most likely to develop close, personal relationships with people who have different backgrounds than themselves. In larger cities, people may be more likely to segregate themselves into their own racial groups. Or perhaps the largeness of a community inherently reduces people’s ability to trust strangers who appear different than themselves. However, this is all speculation, as the study cannot offer a definitive explanation as to what is causing the findings. To answer that question, the researchers plan to undertake additional research that looks more deeply at the conditions under which diversity either does or does not produce a sense of threat amongst Whites.

read the article