Let me end this week devoted to issues of discrimination and how to combat them by looking at a recent scientific experiment that I found thought-provoking.

A group of political scientists from Penn and UCBerkeley went out to investigate parochialism – the way we favor members of our own group at the expense of members of other groups – to understand processes of discrimination in a world were intergroup conflict is on the rise. Donhyun Danny Choi and his colleagues wondered if encounters with a person of a migrant background who acts in ways that show they have integrated our cultural norms would diminish discrimination against them.

Concretely: if you encounter a young woman who is in need of help, and she is either looking like you, an average white person, or looking like an immigrant, or identified as a Muslim by wearing a headscarf, who do you think you’d help?

What if she has shown that she cares about them same norms as you do before she needs help, would that change anything?

Here is the set-up: you have a crew of confederates going to numerous German train stations and enacting the following scenario: Male actor throws a used coffee cup onto the floor. Female actor who is either German or not, identified as Muslima or not, either scolds him or not. She then accidentally drops a bag of oranges and we measure how the bystanders (close to 7000 by the end of the trials) – the German citizens who were privy to the previous events) decide to help her pick up the fruit.

Why Germany? Strongly internalized, widely accepted cultural norm of non-littering that can serve as an indicator of integration if the migrant appeals to it. Also pretty homogenous subject pool of who is waiting around at train stations, adding no noisy variables to the design.

So what you think happened? Was the degree of assistance offered to strangers the same in all groups?

Did immigrants receive less assistance than natives and did religious identity markers (hijabs) that increase the difference (social distance) between natives and immigrants decrease assistance? The answer is: yes. Immigrants were helped less often, and particularly refused help if they were identified as Muslim. The effect was almost double the size in East Germany (the current location of most widely spread White supremacist and nationalist ideology) compared to West Germany.

Did the condition where the immigrant showed adherence to social norms (she scolds the guy for littering) offset the negative bias towards immigrants, indicating that good integration will lead to less discrimination? The answer is yes, but…. it does a little bit, but it does not eliminate bias in its entirety.

Visibly shared norms, then, form a potential basis for a reduction in discrimination and improved cooperation. But the effectiveness of adhering to norms, signaling shared values, is constrained by the salience of intergroup differences. In plain English: no matter how you act like the host culture, if you look quite different, triggering a particular negative stereotype, you’ll be discriminated against.

Note that the non-German actress had still pretty European features. I wonder if they would find more ethnic discrimination than they did with someone who is a black person; even more so if they ran the experiment in the US…although what would the internalized cultural norm be here, that could be appealed to?

A salient religious symbol signaling cultural difference can, theoretically, be removed. Black skin can’t.

Here is something train related….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0