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For decades, students of American society have offered dueling 8. Personal Health: The Truth About Cat and Dog
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the way we live. One says that simple contact — being tossed into a
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insularity. Others argue that just throwing people together is rarely


enough to breed solidarity: when diversity increases, they assert, people tend to stick to
their own groups and distrust those who are different from them.

But what if diversity had an even more complex and pervasive effect? What if, at least in
the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much
everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into
themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home
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This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by Indy 500 drivers stop traffic in Manhattan
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the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems
to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes
in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language,
people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like
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In highly diverse cities and towns like Los Angeles, Houston and Yakima, Wash., the The New York Times Real Estate

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More significant, they were also half as likely to trust people of their own race. They
claimed fewer close friends. They were more apt to agree that “television is my most
important form of entertainment.” They had less confidence in local government and less
confidence in their own ability to exert political influence. They were more likely to join
protest marches but less likely to register to vote. They rated their happiness as generally
lower. And this diversity effect continued to show up even when a community’s
population density, average income, crime levels, rates of home ownership and a host of
other factors were taken into account.

It was not a result that Putnam, the author of the much-discussed 2000 book “Bowling
Alone,” was looking for when he sat down six years ago to examine the mass of data he
had collected. He was hoping to build on his earlier work, which described a precipitous
decline in the nation’s “social capital,” the formal and informal networks — bowling
leagues, parent-teacher associations, fraternal organizations, pick-up basketball games,
youth service groups — that tie people together, shore up civic engagement and forge
bonds of trust and reciprocity. Now he wanted to find out more about how social capital
varied regionally and over time.

But the diversity finding was so surprising that Putnam said his first thought was that
maybe something was wrong with the data. He and his research team spent five years
testing other explanations. Maybe people in more diverse areas had less political clout and
thus fewer amenities, like playgrounds and pothole-free streets, putting them in a
misanthropic mood; or maybe diversity caused “hunkering down” only in people who
were older or richer or white or female. But the effect did not go away. When colleagues
who heard about the results protested, “I bet you haven’t thought about X” — a frequent
occurrence, Putnam said — the researchers went back and looked at X.

The idea that it is diversity (the researchers used the census’s standard racial categories to
define diversity) that drives social capital down has its critics. Among them is Steven
Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and a critic of Putnam’s past work,
who said he thinks some other characteristic, as yet unidentified, explains the lowered
trust and social withdrawal of people living in diverse areas. But without clear evidence to
the contrary, Putnam says, he has to believe the conclusion is solid.

Few would question that it is provocative. The public discourse on diversity runs at a high
temperature. Told by one side, the narrative of how different ethnic and racial groups
come together in schools, workplaces, churches and shopping centers can sound as if it
was lifted from “Sesame Street.” Told by the other, it often carries the shrill tones of a
recent caller to a radio talk show on immigration reform: “The school my kid goes to is 45
percent Mexican,” he said, “and I don’t see this as being a good thing for this country. Do
we want to turn into a Latin American country?”

Putnam’s argument is more nuanced. Diversity has clear benefits, he says, among them
economic growth and enhanced creativity — more top-flight scientists, more
entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people
like me, who are in favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it
takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.

Why that discomfort seems to translate into social isolation and a weakening of civic
bonds remains anyone’s guess. Studies by Wendy Berry Mendes, a social psychologist at
Harvard, and her colleagues find that when research subjects play a cooperative game
with someone of another race, they can show physiological signs of distress — reduced
cardiac efficiency and arterial constriction, for example. On a daily basis, this alarmed
reaction might make people pull inward. Putnam himself speculates that, with
kaleidoscopic changes going on around them, people in diverse communities might
experience a kind of system overload, shutting down “in the presence of confusing or
multiple messages from the environment.”

Still, in Putnam’s view, the findings are neither cause for despair nor a brief against
diversity. If this country’s history is any guide, what people perceive as unfamiliar and
disturbing — what they see as “other” — can and does change over time. Seemingly
intractable group divisions can give way to a larger, overarching identity. When he was in
high school in the 1950s, Putnam notes, he knew the religion of almost every one of the
150 students in his class. At the time, religious intermarriage was uncommon, and
knowing whether a potential mate was a Methodist, a Catholic or a Jew was crucial
information. Half a century later, for most Americans, the importance of religion as a
mating test has dwindled to near irrelevance, “hardly more important than left- or right-
handedness to romance.”

The rising marriage rates across racial and ethnic lines in a younger generation, raised in a
more diverse world, suggest the current markers of difference can also fade in salience. In
some places, they already have: soldiers have more interracial friendships than civilians,
Putnam’s research finds, and evangelical churches in the South show high rates of racial
integration. “If you’re asking me if, in the long run, I’m optimistic,” Putnam says, “the
answer is yes.”

Erica Goode is a science editor at The New York Times.

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Past Coverage
 A Plan to Pay For Top Scores On Some Tests Gains Ground (June 9, 2007)
 50 Years Later, Little Rock Can't Escape Race (May 8, 2007)
 Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories From the South (May 1, 2007)
 To Close Gaps, Schools Focus On Black Boys (April 9, 2007)

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