Interactions and social attitudes in American communities

ABSTRACT

If the views of people are conditioned by those around them, then local socializing interactions could explain the observed spatial patterns of attitudes towards socio-political issues (e.g., legal abortion). Using the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) data on attitudes, combined with economic and population data from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), we show that local socializing interactions do affect sociopolitical attitudes at the community level. We interpret our results drawing from the social psychology literature where interactions that bring contacts with individuals of heterogeneous characteristics lead to more agreeable positions. Cognizant of the reflection problem, we make a distinction between a group and a geographical cluster to achieve identification of the effects of interactions on attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification
• reflection problem
• social attitude
• socializing interactions

Acknowledgments

This research was done when Abdul Munasib was a Research Scientist in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Georgia--Griffin, Griffin, GA. This article was prepared by Abdul Munasib (in collaboration with Devesh Roy) in his personal capacity. The opinions expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Department of Commerce, or the United States government.

Notes

¹ http://campusprogress.org/articles/young_people_support_construction_of_ground_zero_mosque.

² The New York Times, Saturday, 23 October 2010, page A16.

³ The New York Times, 5 May 2005.

⁴ By tolerance of conformity, to quote Stouffer (1955), “we do not mean approval of their views. If we are tolerant of a socialist or an atheist or even of a Communist, it does not mean that we endorse Socialism, atheism, or Communism. Rather it means that we will defend the right, within the law, for points of view of such people to be heard, discussed and debated, and the legal privileges of such people are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to be safeguarded.”

⁵ Blumenson and Nilsen (2010) argue that, as a corollary to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle in the utilitarian tradition, prohibition of marijuana is viewed as a violation of a moral right to exercise autonomy in personal matters. The attitude towards marijuana for the libertarians is outright legalization.

⁶ If we were to estimate the effect of average socializing interaction of the individual’s group on the individual’s own socializing interaction that would be to estimate an endogenous effect.

⁷ In particular, socioeconomic indices of the individual, the individual’s spouse as well the individual’s father.

⁸ Given the nationally representative nature of GSS data, it is reasonable to use external sources to represent a cluster such as BEA and U.S. Census for information that do not exist in the GSS but are available in these data sources.

⁹ The education profile contains data on proportions of sample in the cluster that have some college degree and have completed a college degree, respectively.

¹⁰ Note that we do not have proportion of males or females included since there is very little variation in this number across clusters in GSS data.

¹¹ For detailed information see http://www.arfsys.com.

¹² The data on number of respondents per cluster is available upon request.

¹³ The original variables in GSS take values from {0,1, . .,6} where 6 = almost daily, 5 = several times a week, 4 = several times a month, 3 = once a month, 2 = several times a year, 1 = once a year, 0 = never. In this article, these variables have been converted to “number of meetings a year” with the following assumptions: 6 = 365 times a year, 5 = 156 times a year (i.e., 3 times a week), 4 = 60 times a year (5 times a month), 3 = 12 times a year, 2 = 6 times a year, 1 = once a year, 0 = never. Experiments with different assumptions such as 6 = 312 times a year (i.e., 6 times a week), 5 = 104 times a year (i.e., 2 times a week), and so on do not change the results in any significant way.

¹⁴ Two drawbacks of the religiosity variable are that it covers only the Christian faith and also it does not take into account the intensity of religious association, for example, time spent in the activities. The question regarding the extent of involvement was asked to very few respondents and is not particularly useful in conducting a meaningful empirical analysis.

¹⁵ The social effects comprise the following ones: (i) endogenous effect: where average group behavior influences individual behavior, (ii) exogenous effect: where individual behavior varies with the exogenous characteristics of the group (say, family background), and (iii) correlated effect: where individuals in the same group tend to behave similarly because they are alike or face a common environment (can be unobserved).

¹⁶ More on socioeconomic indices in subsection 4.3.

¹⁷ It includes neighbors who are friends.

¹⁸ If direct questions were asked in the survey about these benefits they could be used to measure. We do not have such information in the GSS.

¹⁹ There indeed can be some cluster level attitudes of solidarity. For example, an individual’s attitude towards local sports franchises might be shaped by cluster level attitudes (sense of optimism for the prevailing year). One could even argue that in cases like this the effective social distance is shorter. However, our argument is that a similar mechanism might not apply in case of social attitudes particularly to the types we are focusing on—it is unlikely that an individual’s attitude towards abortion is shaped by average attitude of the cluster on this issue.

²⁰ One could also argue in favor of the existence of possible exogenous effects at the cluster level—i.e., average of the individual characteristics of the cluster having an effect on the individual attitude. Since we are not trying to estimate these exogenous effects (if there are any), our variables that are employed to account for correlated effects are also used as proxies for exogenous effects.

²¹ See Millimet Daniel and Osang (2007) for applications of this approach. See Ebbes et al. (2009) for a discussion of the effectiveness of the HM approach vis-à-vis other technical instruments.

²² GSS Appendix G: http://www.norc.org/NR/rdonlyres/21C53AAC-1267-43B6-A915-A38857DC9D63/1288/AppendixG.pdf.

²³ In Section 2, we mentioned that according to the “threat hypothesis” the opposite effect of contact hypothesis is a possibility, i.e., as people come in contact with diverse array of people (attitudes) they may become more intolerant towards those people (attitudes). Even if the threat hypothesis is at work, at least for some people, according to our findings, it is clearly not the dominant effect so, on average, contacts leads to more tolerance at the contact level.

²⁴ For a 10% increase (which is just a little short of a 1 standard deviation increase) in church membership in the population is associated with the following effects: proportion of population with accepting views of euthanasia, homosexuality, abortion and military spending reduces by 2, 1.8, 3.6, and 2 percentage points, respectively. For the same magnitude of increase in religiosity, the proportion of population with tolerance towards atheists, racists, communists, militarists and homosexuals reduces by 3.4, 1.8, 2.4, 3, and 3.8 percentage points, respectively.

²⁵ The New York Times, Saturday, 23 October 2010, page A16.

²⁶ The New York Times, Saturday, 23 October 2010, page A15.