Empathy or Antipathy? The Consequences of Racially and Socially Diverse Peers on Attitudes and Behaviors

Mixing across ethnic and class lines could potentially either spur understanding or inflame tensions between groups. We find that white students at a large state university randomly assigned AfricanAmerican roommates are more likely to endorse affirmative action policies 1_- 3_ years after college entry. Whites randomly assigned minority roommates are more likely to say they have more personal contact with and interact more comfortably with members of minority groups, and they are just as likely to remain close friends with their roommates beyond their initial year. Students become less supportive of higher taxes for the wealthy when they are assigned roommates from high-income families, and they appear to be more likely to volunteer when assigned roommates from low-income families. Taken together, these results suggest that students become more empathetic with the social groups to which their roommates belong.

[1]  E. Miguel.  Tribe or Nation?: Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania , 2004 .

[2]  Maria Krysan,et al.  The Residential Preferences of Blacks: Do They Explain Persistent Segregation? , 2002 .

[3]  Erzo F. P. Luttmer.  Group Loyalty and the Taste for Redistribution , 2001, Journal of Political Economy.

[4]  J. Ludwig,et al.  Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment , 2001 .

[5]  David K. Shipler,et al.  A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America@@@America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible , 2001 .

[6]  D. Woodruff,et al.  The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions , 1998 .

[7]  P. Gurin,et al.  Education and Understanding Structural Causes for Group Inequalities , 1998 .

[8]  Casey B. Mulligan,et al.  Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality , 1998 .

[9]  W. Easterly,et al.  Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions , 1997 .

[10]  Lawrence F. Katz,et al.  Why the United States Led in Education: Lessons from Secondary School Expansion, 1910 to 1940 , 1997 .

[11]  A. Alesina,et al.  Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions , 1997 .

[12]  Thomas F. Pettigrew,et al.  Generalized Intergroup Contact Effects on Prejudice , 1997 .

[13]  P. M. King,et al.  A Multicultural View Is a More Cognitively Complex View , 1996 .

[14]  J. Poterba.  Demographic Structure and the Political Economy of Public Education , 1996 .

[15]  C. Manski.  Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem , 1993 .

[16]  W. Evans,et al.  Measuring Peer Group Effects: A Study of Teenage Behavior , 1992, Journal of Political Economy.

[17]  T. Newcomb,et al.  Political Attitudes over the Life Span: The Bennington Women After Fifty Years , 1992 .

[18]  S. Cook.  Toward a Psychology of Improving Justice: Research on Extending the Equality Principle to Victims of Social Injustice , 1990 .

[19]  R. Bornstein,et al.  The Generalizability of Subliminal Mere Exposure Effects: Influence of Stimuli Perceived Without Awareness on Social Behavior , 1987 .

[20]  B. Series,et al.  Barron's Profiles of American Colleges , 1984 .

[21]  Wolfgang Stephan,et al.  School Desegregation: An Evaluation of Predictions Made in Brown v. Board of Education. , 1978 .

[22]  Walter C. Swap,et al.  Interpersonal Attraction and Repeated Exposure to Rewarders and Punishers , 1977 .

[23]  Robert B. Zajonc,et al.  Exposure effects and associative learning , 1974 .

[24]  S. M. Sales,et al.  Attitudinal effects of “mere exposure”: A reevaluation , 1971 .

[25]  J Tudor-Hart,et al.  On the nature of prejudice. , 1961, The Eugenics review.

[26]  P. Gurin,et al.  Expert Report of Patricia Gurin , 1999 .

[27]  Vladimir T. Khmelkov,et al.  Organizational effects on race relations in schools. , 1999 .

[28]  Robert E. Slavin,et al.  Improving Intergroup Relations: Lessons Learned From Cooperative Learning Programs , 1999 .

[29]  A. Pratkanis,et al.  The Significance of Affirmative Action for theSouls of White Folk: Further Implications of a Helping Model , 1999 .

[30]  K. A. Finlay,et al.  The role of empathy in improving intergroup relations. , 1999 .

[31]  R. Moffitt.  Policy Interventions, Low-Level Equilibria, and So-cial Interactions , 1999 .

[32]  P. Gurin,et al.  Context, identity, and intergroup relations. , 1999 .

[33]  J. Bargh.  The automaticity of everyday life. , 1997 .

[34]  D. Ruble,et al.  A phase model of transitions: cognitive and motivational consequences , 1994 .

[35]  R. Slavin,et al.  Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT): Review of Ten Classroom Experiments. , 1978 .

[36]  E. Aronson.  The Jigsaw Classroom , 1978 .

[37]  J. Darley.  Review of Personality and social change: Attitude formation in a student community. , 1944 .