Suchergebnisse

Economists and psychologists often assume that people sort into groups based on similarities. In this article, the validity of this assumption is examined using pairwise data and a new application of a proven analytical technique. I use a unique administrative data set that follows undergraduate students as they move from quasi-randomly assigned housing into self-selected residence groups; social pair formation is measured using behavior, not survey responses. Sorting is observed from the baseline 'clean slate' of random groupings, creating a quasi-experimental environment and circumventing problems inherent in examining selection processes when starting groups are not randomly formed. A wide array of covariates, including original campus location, race, and academic ability is exploited to determine the most important factors driving students' choices about with whom to live. Results support a role for ability in friendship formation, both conditionally and unconditionally, but also a significant and more potent influence of social factors and luck. The article demonstrates a novel approach to the analysis of normally unobserved human sorting processes in a real-world context.

"The present study examined whether living under a communist dictatorship may increase one's level of authoritarianism, thus testing the claim that situational factors affect this personality trait to determine whether authoritarianism may develop within a communist dictatorship (Rokeach, 1960). Three groups were compared regarding their authoritarianism levels, using Altemeyer's (1988) Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale: (a) citizens of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), who immigrated to Israel during the 1970s, (b) citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), who immigrated to Israel during the 1990s, and (c) a control group consisted of native-born Israelis. Three hundred subjects participated in the study. The authoritarianism level of the 1970s immigrants, who had been socialized in the FSU (when the ideal was 'the Soviet Man') and whose affinity to the Jewish collective and to Zionism has been stronger, was found to be significantly higher than both that of the 1990s immigrants, who had come to Israel from a much less monolithic sociopolitical reality (where democratic procedures had already been included in the political system, economics had gone through privatization processes, and collectivism had changed into moderate individualism) and that of die native-born Israelis, who have always lived in a democracy. This finding supports the possibility of developing an authoritarian personality as a reaction to a communist, not only within a fascist right-wing dictatorship. A second finding is that the highest rate of both secular subjects and supporters of die left-wing parties was found among die 1970s immigrants, who scored highest on die Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. This unique pattern is discussed in terms of the sociopolitical context of the secular Zionist ideology and interpreted as an expression of nationalistic protest against die communist dictatorship." (author's abstract)