Home Alone

By ERICA GOODE

For decades, students of American society have offered dueling theories 
about how encountering racial and ethnic diversity affects the way we live. 
One says that simple contact - being tossed into a stew of different 
cultures, values, languages and styles of dress - is likely to nourish 
tolerance and trust. Familiarity, in this view, trumps insularity. Others 
argue that just throwing people together is rarely enough to breed 
solidarity: when diversity increases, they assert, people tend to stick to 
their own groups and distrust those who are different from them.

But what if diversity had an even more complex and pervasive effect? What 
if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led 
residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like 
them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close 
friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television 
in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a 
community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide 
telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and 
his colleagues. "Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group 
division, but anomie or social isolation," Putnam writes in the June issue 
of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. "In colloquial language, 
people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' - that 
is, to pull in like a turtle."

In highly diverse cities and towns like Los Angeles, Houston and Yakima, 
Wash., the survey found, the residents were about half as likely to trust 
people of other races as in homogenous places like Fremont, Mich., or rural 
South Dakota, where, Putnam noted, "diversity means inviting a few 
Norwegians to the annual Swedish picnic."

More significant, they were also half as likely to trust people of their 
own race. They claimed fewer close friends. They were more apt to agree 
that "television is my most important form of entertainment." They had less 
confidence in local government and less confidence in their own ability to 
exert political influence. They were more likely to join protest marches 
but less likely to register to vote. They rated their happiness as 
generally lower. And this diversity effect continued to show up even when a 
community's population density, average income, crime levels, rates of home 
ownership and a host of other factors were taken into account.

It was not a result that Putnam, the author of the much-discussed 2000 book 
"Bowling Alone," was looking for when he sat down six years ago to examine 
the mass of data he had collected. He was hoping to build on his earlier 
work, which described a precipitous decline in the nation's "social 
capital," the formal and informal networks - bowling leagues, 
parent-teacher associations, fraternal organizations, pick-up basketball 
games, youth service groups - that tie people together, shore up civic 
engagement and forge bonds of trust and reciprocity. Now he wanted to find 
out more about how social capital varied regionally and over time.

But the diversity finding was so surprising that Putnam said his first 
thought was that maybe something was wrong with the data. He and his 
research team spent five years testing other explanations. Maybe people in 
more diverse areas had less political clout and thus fewer amenities, like 
playgrounds and pothole-free streets, putting them in a misanthropic mood; 
or maybe diversity caused "hunkering down" only in people who were older or 
richer or white or female. But the effect did not go away. When colleagues 
who heard about the results protested, "I bet you haven't thought about X" 
- a frequent occurrence, Putnam said - the researchers went back and looked 
at X.

The idea that it is diversity (the researchers used the census's standard 
racial categories to define diversity) that drives social capital down has 
its critics. Among them is Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University 
of Wisconsin 
<http://mail.ashoka.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_wisconsin/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
and a critic of Putnam's past work, who said he thinks some other 
characteristic, as yet unidentified, explains the lowered trust and social 
withdrawal of people living in diverse areas. But without clear evidence to 
the contrary, Putnam says, he has to believe the conclusion is solid.

Few would question that it is provocative. The public discourse on 
diversity runs at a high temperature. Told by one side, the narrative of 
how different ethnic and racial groups come together in schools, 
workplaces, churches and shopping centers can sound as if it was lifted 
from "Sesame Street." Told by the other, it often carries the shrill tones 
of a recent caller to a radio talk show on immigration reform: "The school 
my kid goes to is 45 percent Mexican," he said, "and I don't see this as 
being a good thing for this country. Do we want to turn into a Latin 
American country?"

Putnam's argument is more nuanced. Diversity has clear benefits, he says, 
among them economic growth and enhanced creativity - more top-flight 
scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference is also 
disconcerting, he maintains, "and people like me, who are in favor of 
diversity, don't do ourselves any favors by denying that it takes time to 
become comfortable," Putnam says.

Why that discomfort seems to translate into social isolation and a 
weakening of civic bonds remains anyone's guess. Studies by Wendy Berry 
Mendes, a social psychologist at Harvard, and her colleagues find that when 
research subjects play a cooperative game with someone of another race, 
they can show physiological signs of distress - reduced cardiac efficiency 
and arterial constriction, for example. On a daily basis, this alarmed 
reaction might make people pull inward. Putnam himself speculates that, 
with kaleidoscopic changes going on around them, people in diverse 
communities might experience a kind of system overload, shutting down "in 
the presence of confusing or multiple messages from the environment."

Still, in Putnam's view, the findings are neither cause for despair nor a 
brief against diversity. If this country's history is any guide, what 
people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing - what they see as "other" - 
can and does change over time. Seemingly intractable group divisions can 
give way to a larger, overarching identity. When he was in high school in 
the 1950s, Putnam notes, he knew the religion of almost every one of the 
150 students in his class. At the time, religious intermarriage was 
uncommon, and knowing whether a potential mate was a Methodist, a Catholic 
or a Jew was crucial information. Half a century later, for most Americans, 
the importance of religion as a mating test has dwindled to near 
irrelevance, "hardly more important than left- or right-handedness to 
romance."

The rising marriage rates across racial and ethnic lines in a younger 
generation, raised in a more diverse world, suggest the current markers of 
difference can also fade in salience. In some places, they already have: 
soldiers have more interracial friendships than civilians, Putnam's 
research finds, and evangelical churches in the South show high rates of 
racial integration. "If you're asking me if, in the long run, I'm 
optimistic," Putnam says, "the answer is yes."

Erica Goode is a science editor at The New York Times.

-------------------
Problems/Questions? Send it to Listserv owner: [log in to unmask]


To unsubscribe, send the following message in the text section -- NOT the subject header --  to [log in to unmask]

SIGNOFF SDOH

DO NOT SEND IT BY HITTING THE REPLY BUTTON. THIS SENDS THE MESSAGE TO THE ENTIRE LISTSERV AND STILL DOES NOT REMOVE YOU.

To subscribe to the SDOH list, send the following message to [log in to unmask] in the text section, NOT in the subject header.

SUBSCRIBE SDOH yourfirstname yourlastname

To post a message to all 1200+ subscribers, send it to [log in to unmask]
Include in the Subject, its content, and location and date, if relevant.

For a list of SDOH members, send a request to [log in to unmask]

To receive messages only once a day, send the following message to [log in to unmask]
SET SDOH DIGEST

To view the SDOH archives, go to: https://listserv.yorku.ca/archives/sdoh.html