Discriminations

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) thinks so.

“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 a turtle.”

Putnam has been engaged in his large study of diversity for quite a while, and we have encountered findings from it before, here and here.

Putnam seems quite taken with his turtle metaphor (or maybe I’m just taken with quoting him using it). In the first “here” linked above, I quoted him as follows describing his findings:

The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, “the most diverse human habitation in human history”, but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where “diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians’ picnic.”

Actually, turning people into turtles may be among the mildest effects of diversity. The New York Times Magazine linked first above, for example, also reports other, non-reptilian but even more unwelcome effects.

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.”

It’s thus no surprise, and maybe even a good thing, that campuses that fetishize “diversity” are often the ones sporting the most racially segregated dorms, dining room tables, lounges, etc.

In my first discussion of Putnam’s research, linked above, I commented:

If we’re going to set aside the formerly fundamental principle barring discrimination against any person based on race in order to bask in the benefits provided by “diversity,” shouldn’t we at least begin seeing, sooner or later, some research demonstrating just what those benefits are?

That now seems too mild. Let me rephrase: shouldn’t we at least begin seeing some research demonstrating that “diversity” doesn’t turn people into turtles or sick, arterially constricted, stressed out humans?