The Cognitive Consequences of Internal Migration: Evidence from China

• In Event: 30260 - Joint Roundtables: Section on Social Psychology and Section on Sociology of Emotions
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 4: Social Cohesion

Abstract

For decades, China has been undergoing the largest internal migration in human history, and it is ongoing. A flourishing sociological literature has examined the consequences of internal migration on rural-urban divides, health, child development, and other inequalities for individuals and their sending and receiving communities in China today. However, few studies have investigated whether and how migration might restructure migrants’ social perceptions over time, overlooking the potential impacts on migrants’ hearts and minds from migration-related new exposure. I undertake this crucial task by leveraging multiple waves of panel data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS), tracking nationally representative samples of migrants and non-migrants over their life course. Employing social trust as the analytic lens, I look into individuals’ within-person changes in trust attitudes associated with internal migration experience, examining their particularized trust toward ingroups and outgroups and generalized trust toward “most people.” Borrowing the concept of migration selectivity from the international migration literature, I assess further how the internal migration experience tends to alter the initial trust differentials between the migrants and their non-migrant counterparts accounting for migrants’ trust selectivity. Despite the stability of generalized trust, as previous literature often suggests, I find significant increases in internal migrants’ particularized outgroup trust, especially for those starting with a more traditional mind and rural Hukou origin prior to migration. Preliminary analysis also suggests that migrants’ are positively selected in outgroup trust relative to non-migrants. Overall, findings from this research demonstrate persistent cognitive impacts of internal migration on individuals’ trust attitudes, offering granular evidence on the long-standing debates over the lifetime malleability of individuals’ trust perceptions.

Author

• Qian He, Chinese University of Hong Kong