Ethnic Diversity and Personal Contacts at Work and at School in the Netherlands: a Comparison of Natives and Ethnic Minorities

We examined to what extent ethnic diversity in neighborhoods and municipalities in the Netherlands is related to personal contacts at work and at school with the ethnic in- and out-groups, among the native majority as well as ethnic minorities. Constrict theory, ethnic competition theory, and contact theory are used to derive hypotheses. A unique Dutch dataset with an oversampling of two large minority groups is analyzed with three-level multilevel regression models. The results indicate that ethnic diversity at the municipality level is negatively related to personal contacts with native colleagues and schoolmates, but positively related to personal contacts with colleagues and schoolmates from other ethnic groups. Ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level is not related to personal contacts at work and at school. This applies equally to native respondents and Turks and Moroccans, rejecting Putnam's hunkering down hypothesis and ethnic competition theory. Instead, ethnic diversity increases meeting opportunities with ethnic minorities while decreasing meeting opportunities with the native majority.     

Creating ‘Local Publics’: Responsibility and Involvement in Decision-Making on Technologies with Local Impacts

Science and Engineering Ethics - This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of...     

Overcoming ego depletion: the influence of exemplar priming on self‐control performance

Self‐regulation research suggested that active self‐control depends on a limited resource. Therefore the capacity for self‐control is lower among people who already exercised control, a phenomenon labelled as ego depletion. This experiment examines whether priming of a persistent person exemplar may help to overcome ego depletion. Half of the participants engaged in a demanding self‐control task (solving extremely difficult labyrinths) whereas the other half took part in a task that demanded little self‐control (solving easy labyrinths). Then, half of the participants received a person exemplar prime related to persistence; the other half received a neutral prime. Finally, participants' persistence on a subsequent self‐control task (squeezing a handgrip) was measured. The effect of a person exemplar prime on a subsequent self‐control task depended on initial self‐control demands. Participants who exercised high initial self‐control and were then presented with a persistent exemplar prime showed assimilation. Their handgrip persistence was higher than the persistence of participants who received a neutral prime. Under conditions of low initial self‐control the opposite pattern was found. A persistent person prime resulted in contrast and resulted in lower handgrip performance as compared to those who received a neutral prime. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.