Александр Яркин (Браунский университет) представит работу “Diseases, diversity, and out-group attitudes: Evidence from 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak and historical pathogen prevalence”.
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Александр Яркин (Браунский университет) представит работу “Diseases, diversity, and out-group attitudes: Evidence from 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak and historical pathogen prevalence”.
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Краткое содержание:
In this paper, I explore the persistence and change in the attitudes towards diversity – people’s views on various out-group members based on ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural and other identity lines. Specifically, I address the role of historical disease prevalence and contemporary epidemics in shaping these attitudes. First, I utilize the historical data on the prevalence of several infectious diseases to show that larger risks of contracting a novel pathogen historically map into worse out-group attitudes today. This result holds for various measures of out-group attitudes and several identification strategies. Second, I explore the case of West African Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 to show that, indeed, an exposure to a larger Ebola shock leads to lower national, as opposed to ethnic, identity at the local level. However, there exists a large heterogeneity in the effects of Ebola: people living in regions that (i) were more ethnically diverse, and (ii) had more trust in strangers to begin with, actually show an increase in their national identity. Thus, massive social shocks, such as deadly epidemics, may increase polarization in social attitudes.