Ryan D. Enos

Causal effect of intergroup contact on exclusionary attitudes

Significance There is generally conflict when members of different social groups, such as racial, ethnic, or religious groups, come in contact in the same geographic area. This phenomenon is commonly observed across a variety of settings. However, the cause of such conflict is poorly understood: Some theorists have argued that contact between groups is insufficient to cause conflict and that, under certain conditions contact may lead to improved intergroup relations. Although most theories of contact propose that repeated contact between individuals is important to the disposition of intergroup attitudes, experimenting on the effects of repeated contact has proven difficult. Here, I report a randomized controlled trial that assigns repeated intergroup contact between members of different ethnic groups. The contact results in exclusionary attitudes toward the outgroup. The effect of intergroup contact has long been a question central to social scientists. As political and technological changes bring increased international migration, understanding intergroup contact is increasingly important to scientific and policy debates. Unfortunately, limitations in causal inference using observational data and the practical inability to experimentally manipulate demographic diversity has limited scholars’ ability to address the effects of intergroup contact. Here, I report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing the causal effects of repeated intergroup contact, in which Spanish-speaking confederates were randomly assigned to be inserted, for a period of days, into the daily routines of unknowing Anglo-whites living in homogeneous communities in the United States, thus simulating the conditions of demographic change. The result of this experiment is a significant shift toward exclusionary attitudes among treated subjects. This experiment demonstrates that even very minor demographic change causes strong exclusionary reactions. Developed nations and politically liberal subnational units are expected to experience a politically conservative shift as international migration brings increased intergroup contact.

Increasing Inequality: The Effect of GOTV Mobilization on the Composition of the Electorate

Numerous get-out-the-vote (GOTV) interventions are successful in raising voter turnout. However, these increases may not be evenly distributed across the electorate and could potentially increase the differences between voters and nonvoters. By analyzing individual level-data, we reassess previous GOTV experiments to determine which interventions mobilize under-represented citizens versus those who regularly turn out. We develop a generalized and exportable test which indicates whether a particular intervention reduces or exacerbates disparities in political participation and apply it to 24 previous experimental interventions. On average, current mobilization strategies significantly widen disparities in participation by mobilizing high-propensity individuals more than the under-represented, low-propensity citizens. The results hold troubling implications for the study and improvement of political inequality, but the methodological procedures laid out in this study may assist the development and testing o...

Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem

As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show that in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign’s behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters’ priorities. We find little evidence that the campaign was able to use strategies of agent control to mitigate its principal-agent problem. We question whether individuals typically willing to be volunteer surrogates are productive agents for a strategic campaign.

Intergroup Behavioral Strategies as Contextually Determined: Experimental Evidence from Israel

Why are the negative effects of social diversity more pronounced in some places than in others? What are the mechanisms underlying the relationship between diversity and discriminatory behaviors, and why do they vary in prevalence and strength across locations? Experimental research has made advances in examining these questions by testing for differences in behavior when interacting with individuals from different groups. At the same time, research in American and comparative politics has demonstrated that attitudes toward other groups are a function of context. Uniting these two lines of research, we argue that discriminatory behaviors should be strongly conditioned by the ways in which groups are organized in space, allowing us to make predictions about the relationship between diversity, segregation, and intergroup behavior. We examine this claim in the context of intra-Jewish cleavage in Israel, using original data compiled through multisite lab-in-the-field experiments and survey responses collected across 20 locations.

Campaign Perceptions of Electoral Closeness: Uncertainty, Fear and Over-Confidence

In partnership with state Democratic parties and the Obama campaign, the authors surveyed staffers from nearly 200 electoral campaigns in 2012, asking about the expected vote share in their races. Political operatives’ perceptions of closeness can affect how they campaign and represent citizens, but their perceptions may be wildly inaccurate: campaigns may irrationally fear close contests or be unrealistically optimistic. Findings indicate that political operatives are more optimistic than fearful, and that incumbent and higher-office campaigns are more accurate at assessing their chances. While the public may be better served by politicians fearing defeat, campaigns are typically staffed by workers who are over-confident, which may limit the purported benefits of electoral competition.

Context, Perception, and Intergroup Relations

In the target article, Y. Jenny Xiao, Geraldine Coppin, and Jay J. Van Bavel make a compelling case for the effects of social groups on perception and intergroup relations and propose that social i...

TELLab: An Experiential Learning Tool for Psychology

In this paper, we discuss current practices and challenges of teaching psychology experiments. We review experiential learning and analogical learning pedagogies, which have informed the design of TELLab, an online platform for supporting effective experiential learning of psychology concepts.

Reply to van Hoorn: Pitfalls of narrow interpretations of significance

van Hoorn (1) argues that the conclusions reached in my report (2) are unwarranted because of pitfalls associated with (i) effect sizes, (ii) effect duration, and (iii) subject selection. None of these concerns should properly be labeled as pitfalls.