Episode 3.1: Overcoming the Hijab Penalty, with Donghyun Danny Choi

Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it?

When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion. 

In a new book with Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis, our guest Donghyun Danny Choi, an assistant professor of political science at Brown, uses an innovative set of field experiments to test an alternative possibility: that the native-born perceive migrants as a threat to longstanding civic norms. 

Could anti-immigrant bias be shaped by fears – often unjustified – that newcomers don’t share the same ideas about the meaning and practice of citizenship? Can misperceptions about norm-divergence be corrected? And are there interventions that can actually lead native-born citizens to adopt more cooperative behaviors across ethnic and cultural divides?

In their book Native Bias, Danny and his coauthors try to get at these questions using a wonderfully creative set of experiments, carried out across Germany shortly after the arrival of over a million Syrian refugees. You’ll have to listen to find out how the experiments worked – but for now we’ll just say that they involved dropping thousands of lemons on train platforms. 

We talk with Danny about how the team came up with their experimental designs, how they carried them out, and what they found. One of their most interesting findings is that native German women tend to be more accepting of Muslim female migrants who signal that they hold progressive gender norms. But we also push Danny on the implications of the book’s findings. The treatments in the experiments involve immigrants demonstrably signaling their adherence to dominant German values. Even if this signaling works to dampen discrimination, we wondered how exactly this kind of intervention can be scaled up to the societal level. We also talk with Danny about who the book is saying bears the onus of reducing discrimination: is it up to immigrants to “fit in” better or up to natives to examine their own prejudices? 

Works discussed in the episode:

Adida, Claire L., David D. Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort. 2016. Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Balafoutas, Loukas, Nikos Nikiforakis, Bettina Rockenbach. 2014. “Direct and Indirect Punishment among Strangers in the Field.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 111 (45): 15924-15927.

Bogardus, Emory S. 1926. “Social Distance in the City.” Proceedings and Publications of the American Sociological Society 20: 40-46.

Creighton, Mathew J., and Amaney Jamal. 2015. “Does Islam Play a Role in Anti-Immigrant Sentiment? An Experimental Approach.” Social Science Research 53: 89-103.

Hainmueller, Jens, and Daniel J. Hopkins. 2015. “The Hidden American Immigration Consensus: A Conjoint Analysis of Attitudes toward Immigrants.” American Journal of Political Science 59 (3): 529-548.

Helbling, Marc, and Richard Traunmüller. 2020. “What Is Islamophobia? Disentangling Citizens’ Feelings Toward Ethnicity, Religion and Religiosity Using a Survey Experiment.” British Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 811-828.

Hopkins, Daniel J. 2015. “The Upside of Accents: Language, Inter-Group Difference, and Attitudes toward Immigration.” British Journal of Political Science 45 (3): 531-557.

Mousa, Salma. 2020. "Building Social Cohesion between Christians and Muslims through Soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq." Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 369 (6505): 866-870.

Scheve, Kenneth F., and Matthew J. Slaughter. 2001. “Labor market competition and individual preferences over immigration policy.” Review of Economics and Statistics 83 (1): 133-145.

Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. 1986. “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.” In Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by Stephen Worchel and William G. Austin, 7-24. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.