Prague, May 22 (CTK) – Czech scientists have revealed how important role the model behaviour of peers plays in spreading ethnic hatred in a study they published in the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) prestigious American journal, daily Lidove noviny (LN) wrote on Tuesday.
Experts have long been interested in why ethnic conflicts escalate so rapidly. Czech economists from the CERGE-EI institute and the Institute of Economic Studies have released an experimental study that clarifies that “ethnic hostility is contagious” and that the peer effect is significant in its escalation.
“The main point of the article is that even in the societies where discrimination is not obvious under normal circumstances, one must always keep in mind the risk of a conflict escalating quite rapidly. The tendency to behave destructively is considerably stronger if people are incited to it by their surroundings,” the authors, Julie Chytilova and Michal Bauer, wrote.
“Besides, the contagiousness level roughly doubles if the destructive behaviour is targeted at an individual from another ethnic group,” the authors added.
Along with Jana Cahlikova, who now works at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and Tomas Zelinsky from Kosice, east Slovakia, they carried out a series of experiments showings which factors speed up and double the hatred of others, for instance, the Roma people.
The new finding means significant progress in the discrimination studies since it focuses on social behaviour and the birth of the hostility.
“We wanted to test to what extent other people’s behaviour can become a significant initiator,” Bauer said.
The authors cite an experiment in Slovakia carried out since 2013 among 327 school children in 13 schools. They played a game entitled “Joy of Destruction” designed to identify hostile behavior.
Two groups of players received a sum of two euros each and simultaneously chose whether to pay 0.20 euros to reduce their counterpart’s income by one euro or to keep the payoffs unchanged. They know that their counterpart is someone from the list of 20 typically Roma names and 30 Slavic names.
The experiment proves that the participants who did not observe the decision-making of their peers did not discriminate against – they treated the Romas and “their own people” in the same way, which is quite positive.
On the other hand, the destructive tendency increased if the players saw before their own decision that their schoolmates had decided to do harm. Then their hostile behaviour was much stronger towards the Romas.
The Czech study proposed a methodology that was tested in a certain culture, but can be applied for various other ethnic groups.
“Out of the scientific point of view, the idea to measure the hatred spread might be the most interesting one. That is not only whether the tension between various ethnic groups exists, but also how people’s behaviour is changing depending on the social context,” Bauer said.
“Fragile standards can lead to a sudden change of behaviour towards other ethnic groups – from cohabitation to aggression,” Cahlikova said.
This is why it is important to suppress and punish any hate crimes, she added.
The work of the Czech scientists was assessed by editor George A. Akerlof from Berkeley, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economy from 2001, who sent many valuable comments to the authors, who repeatedly published their articles, for instance, on discrimination and micro-loans in India, in the prestigious American Economic Review journal, LN writes.
