Does Ethnic Difference Breed Distrust?

Prevailing theories suggest that there is less trust among people in diverse communities than in more ethnically homogeneous societies. However, studies of highly diverse former Soviet republics show that a strong attachment to one’s own group do not necessarily mean a lack of trust toward another group, especially where groups share experiences.

“Differences in ethnicity do not imply ethnic conflict,” says Rick Wilson, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science at Rice. He was a member of a team of U.S. political scientists and senior scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences that recently examined some of the factors that give rise to generalized and cross-ethnic trust through the experience of two ethnically diverse republics in the Russian Federation. Their study of these communities raise doubts about earlier assumptions that people trust their own ethnic groups but not others.

“We expected to witness a great deal of ethnic conflict,” says Wilson, chair of the political science department, “but instead we found a significant amount of cross-ethnic trust. In fact, we found the propensity to trust is rather remarkable given what most people think about transitional societies.”

The researchers focused on the republics of Tatarstan and Sakha-Yakutia. Situated in the middle of the Volga Basin, the northern-most frontier between Muslim and Orthodox Christian worlds, Tatarstan is one of the former Soviet Union’s major cultural and educational centers. Sakha-Yakutia, the largest republic in the Russian Federation, is located in northeastern Siberia.

The researchers chose these two republics because of their ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic, religious, and racial diversity and their leadership in asserting their rights. The republics also devote considerable resources to reviving their languages and cultures in the late 1980s and 1990s. Tatars make up about half of the population in Tatarstan, while 40 percent of the population in Sakha is Yakuts. The bulk of remaining populations in each republic is Russian. The researchers conducted surveys in each republic in spring and summer 2002 to measure the level of interethnic trust between the Russians and each of the other two groups, as well as the trust of the Russians, Tatars, and Yakuts toward less visible, more distant groups.

While they confirmed the findings of earlier studies—that most people are cautious about others and significantly more trusting of those in their own ethnic group—Wilson and his colleagues found striking results regarding peoples’ confidence in the “out group”—those people representing another ethnic group. “Over 90 percent of Tatars trusted Russians,” says Wilson, “and local Russians expressed almost the same high level of faith in Tatars. Around 70 percent of Yakuts and Russians expressed mutual confidence as well.”

Several factors were found to influence a person’s level of trust across ethnic lines. “Regardless of whether they were Russian, Tatar, or Yakut, people who had higher confidence in their government, more generalized faith in people, and less attachment to their own group’s particular norms, expressed more trust in ‘out groups,’” explains Wilson. “However, the fact that we found a high degree of cross-ethnic trust in these republics where the Russian government has been less-than-democratic in recent years implies that people have a shared set of experiences that allows them to trust one another across ethnic lines.”
Wilson and his colleagues also found similar factors came into play when measuring each ethnic group’s level of trust toward other groups with which they had little or no contact, namely, Jews, Chinese, Americans, and Chechens.

One of the most important conclusions, says Wilson, was their finding that a strong attachment and trust to one’s own group did not necessarily mean a lack of trust toward another group. According to the researchers, only a small minority from any of the ethnic groups was exclusionary—expressing trust in their own group but no confidence in the others. Two-thirds of those who responded to the survey in Sakha and four-fifths in Tatarstan were trustful of both their own and the other ethnic group.

“More recent thinking has suggested that ethnic difference is a barrier to cross-ethnic trust,” says Wilson. “We did not find that to be the case in these two republics. Very few people in these ethnically diverse communities trusted their own ethnic group but distrusted others outside their group.”

Wilson’s colleagues were Donna Bahry, chair of political science at Pennsylvania State University, and Mikhail Kosolapov and Polina Kozyreva, both of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The research was accomplished with the support of the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. The results appear in a 2005 report titled “Ethnicity and Trust: Evidence from Russia.”