Rice researcher finds significant amount of cross-ethnic trust

Rice researcher finds significant amount of cross-ethnic trust

BY PAM SHERIDAN
Special to the Rice News

Prevailing theories suggest that there is less trust among people in diverse communities than in more ethnically homogeneous societies. So a team of scientists recently examined some of the factors that give rise to generalized and cross-ethnic trust through the experience of two ethnically diverse republics in the Russian Federation. Their study of these communities raises doubts about earlier assumptions that people trust their own ethnic groups but not others.

Rick Wilson, chair and the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science and professor of statistics and of psychology, was a member of the research team. “We expected to witness a great deal of ethnic conflict, but instead we found a significant amount of cross-ethnic trust,” he said. “In fact, we found the propensity to trust is rather remarkable, given what most people think about transitional societies.”

With the support of the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Wilson and his colleagues — Donna Bahry of Pennsylvania State University and Mikhail Kosolapov and Polina Kozyreva, both of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences — co-authored a report in January titled “Ethnicity and Trust: Evidence from Russia.”

The researchers focused on the republics of Tatarstan and Sakha-Yakutia.

The researchers chose these two republics because of their ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic, religious and racial diversity and their leadership in asserting their rights and devoting considerable resources to reviving their languages and cultures in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Tatars make up approximately half of the population in Tatarstan, while 40 percent of the population in Sakha is Yakuts. The bulk of remaining populations in each republic is Russian.

In the spring and summer of 2002, the researchers conducted surveys in each republic to measure the level of interethnic trust between the Russians and each of the other two groups, as well as the trust of the Russians, Tatars and Yakuts toward less-visible, more-distant groups.

While they confirmed the findings of earlier studies — that most people are cautious about others and more trusting of those in their own ethnic group — Wilson and his colleagues found striking results regarding peoples’ confidence in the “out-group,” those people representing the other ethnic group.

“Over 90 percent of Tatars trusted Russians,” Wilson said, “and local Russians expressed almost the same high level of faith in Tatars. Around 70 percent of Yakuts and Russians expressed mutual confidence as well.”

Wilson and his colleagues also found similar factors came into play when measuring each ethnic group’s level of trust toward other groups with which they had little or no contact, namely, Jews, Chinese, Americans and Chechens.

“Regardless of whether they were Russian, Tatar or Yakut, people who had higher confidence in their government, more generalized faith in people and less attachment to their own group’s particular norms expressed more trust in ‘out groups,’” he said.

Wilson said one of the most important conclusions was their finding that a strong attachment and trust to one’s own group did not necessarily mean a lack of trust toward another group. According to the authors, only a small minority from any of the ethnic groups was exclusionary — expressing trust in their own group but no confidence in the others. Two-thirds of those who responded to the survey in Sakha and four-fifths in Tatarstan were trustful of both their own and the other ethnic group.

“More recent thinking has suggested that ethnic difference is a barrier to cross-ethnic trust,” Wilson said. “We did not find that to be the case in these two republics.

“Very few people in these ethnically diverse communities trusted their own ethnic group but distrusted others outside their group.”

As in prior studies, the team also found a positive connection between cross-ethnic trust and a person’s confidence in the government.

“The fact we found a high degree of cross-ethnic trust in these republics where the Russian government has been less-than-democratic in recent years implies that people have a shared set of experiences that allows them to trust one another across ethnic lines,” Wilson said. “Differences in ethnicity does not imply ethnic conflict.”