Conditionally Desirable Diversity: Two Survey Experiments on Neighborhood Perceptions

• In Event: 20803 - Fragile Communities: Residents Coping with Shocks, Changes, and Inequities

Abstract

Many express support for diversity but make choices that reinforce homophily. Neighborhood preferences are an ideal case for examining this because of their role in inequality. How do signals of diversity and group threat based on groups’ relative sizes influence individual perceptions of desirable neighborhoods? This paper revisits this long-standing topic with two original conjoint experiments that survey the relational importance of and between neighborhoods’ green space (only in Study 1), racial composition, socioeconomic status (SES) composition, and LGBTQ representation (expanded in Study 2). In Study 1 (N = 2,413), I find evidence corroborating the diversity ideology (i.e., self-interested support for diversity that veils bias). Expressed preference and perceived diversity largely move in tandem, but prejudice against non-Whites and subtle patterns of homophily persist. In Study 2 (N = 1,480), I employ a two‐tier randomization design to randomly induce racial group threat and examine whether demographic threat influences how Whites conceptualize desirable and diverse neighborhoods. The results confirm findings from Study 1, while further showing that Whites’ endorsements of diversity become tenuous under perceived threat, as they intensify their preferences for White-majority, higher-income neighborhoods. Therefore, favorable views of diversity are arguably contingent on the absence or silence of salient threat cues, suggesting that non-poor Whites’ embrace of diversity is fragile and abstract commitments to diversity may falter when the stability of racial hierarchy is challenged. While the treatment effects are not large in magnitude, their causal nature straightforwardly present hidden or specific conditions of the diversity ideology that otherwise can be difficult to tease out.

Author

• Khoi Ngo, Washington University in St. Louis