Diversity divides societies, lowers mutual trust

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Diversity divides societies, lowers mutual trust

2016 Apr 4, 11:48am 58,411 views 236 comments

http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/

The Downside of Diversity

From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger. But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as...

#diversity

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curious2 @ 2016 Apr 4, 1:31pm

Diversity has benefits, like crop rotation or a garden. The author notes that engineering benefits from bringing together people from different backgrounds, and culture can also. The issue though comes down to what those contexts have in common: planning and a shared goal.

Instead, politics devolves too often into trench warfare between two rival patronage networks, each hurling insults at the other, and words like "conservative" or "liberal" or "diversity" can lose meaning and become almost incoherent. Most people would rather agree than think, so they join a team.

If you live in a NATO country and import millions of Muslims who believe they have a sacred obligation to kill you, especially while you are bombing their country and financing the militias that drove them out of their homes, and they know that and blame you for it, then you are likely to end up with less trust. When some of those people begin to take revenge by bombing the cities that have welcomed them, trust gets replaced by mass surveillance, which results in even less trust.

(If AI ever achieves Total Information Awareness, including mind reading, it will probably suspect everybody all the time. The thoughts of countless motorists stuck in traffic jams might easily be mistaken for those of a terrorist or serial killer. Yet, when the traffic clears, most motorists return to normal.)

The success of diversity depends on shared goals. If the ultimate goals are antithetical, e.g. Islam vs Enlightenment, problems result and trust declines. If you don't acknowledge that and plan for it, then trust declines sooner.