@article{1286, keywords = {religion, , interreligious attitudes, explicit prejudice, implicit bias, proximity, interactions}, author = {Sharon Barnhardt}, title = {Near and Dear? Evaluating the Impact of Neighbor Diversity on Inter-Religious Attitudes}, abstract = {
This paper provides experimental evidence on whether having religiously different neighbors affects attitudes about other religious groups and/or preferences for interreligious living. I exploit a natural experiment in a large Indian city in which Hindus and Muslims were randomly assigned units in a public housing complex with physically distinct "clusters" of four units. The lottery generates exogenous variation in the degree of religious diversity across clusters within the complex. I conduct an original survey of 1363 household that focuses on explicit and implicit attitudes about members of the other religion and willingness to live together. My estimates demonstrate that location influences interactions, in that individuals spend significant time with others in their cluster. Increased proximity and interaction, in turn, affect attitudes. Greater exposure to Muslims (the minority group) improves Hindus{\textquoteright} explicit attitudes about Muslims by 0.25 to 0.40 standard deviations, depending on the measure, and increases their willingness to live with Muslims. Paralleling this, I observe significant reductions in implicit bias against Muslims (0.20 to 0.57 standard deviations) among Hindu children. While I observe no significant effects for Muslims, the overall effect is a convergence of attitudes across religious groups. As India expands public housing for the poor to accommodate rapid urbanization, deliberate mixing of religious groups can be a way of improving attitudes toward the religious minority.
}, year = {2009}, journal = {Unpublished working paper}, publisher = {Citeseer}, url = {https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/near-and-dear-evaluating-impact-neighbor-diversity-inter-religious-attitudes}, }