Un nuevo trabajo de Sharon Barnhardt estudia cómo la proximidad y la interacción en el vecindario afecta las relaciones entre hindúes y musulmanes en un barrio de la India: Near and Dear? Evaluating the Impact of Neighbor Diversity on Inter-Religious Attitudes (vía Marginal Revolution). Una mayor exposición de los hindúes a los musulmanes mejora la actitud hacia ellos. Aunque en el caso de los musulmanes la proximidad no tiene apenas influencia, en balance hay convergencia de actitudes.
This paper provides experimental evidence on whether religiously diverse neighbors affect attitudes about another religious group and/or preferences for inter-religious 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 ethnic diversity across clusters within the complex, which is rare among adult households. I conduct an original survey of 1363 households focusing on attitudes about members of the other religion and willingness to live together. To overcome concerns about self-presentation bias, I also measure implicit attitudes via an Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a representative sub-sample. My estimates demonstrate 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' 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 (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.
