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Hate crime towards minoritized groups increases as they increase in sized-based rank

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 1537–1544 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

People are on the move in unprecedented numbers within and between countries. How does demographic change affect local intergroup dynamics? Complementing accounts that emphasize stereotypical features of groups as determinants of their treatment, we propose the group reference dependence hypothesis: violence and negative attitudes towards each minoritized group will depend on the number and size of other minoritized groups in a community. Specifically, as groups increase or decrease in rank in terms of their size (for example, to the largest minority within a community), discriminatory behaviour and attitudes towards them should change accordingly. We test this hypothesis for hate crimes in US counties between 1990 and 2010 and attitudes in the United States and United Kingdom over the past two decades. Consistent with this prediction, we find that as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian and Arab populations increase in rank relative to one another, they become more likely to be targeted with hate crimes and more negative attitudes. The rank effect holds above and beyond group size/proportion, growth rate and many other alternative explanations. This framework makes predictions about how demographic shifts may affect coalitional structures in the coming years and helps explain previous findings in the literature. Our results also indicate that attitudes and behaviours towards social categories are not intransigent or driven only by features associated with those groups, such as stereotypes.

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Fig. 1: Hate crimes by group rank, conditional on group size.
Fig. 2: Change in hate crimes around the rank change threshold.
Fig. 3: Effect of rank on hate crimes.

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Data availability

The datasets can be downloaded at the Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/EBXLRT. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code can be downloaded at the Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/EBXLRT.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Davenport, E. Dinas, B. Enke, J. Hainmueller, A. Schläpfer, Y. Xu and seminar participants at the InterGroup Relations Workshop, the Harvard Behavioral Insights Group Webinar, the Minority Politics Seminar Series and the Harvard Behavioral Political Economy Workshop for helpful comments and suggestions. This research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation CAREER award (no. BCS-1653188 awarded to M.C.). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. S. Farina, L. Mosillo, G. Romano, G. S. Peyer and N. Hunt provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are ours.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Mina Cikara

  2. Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Vasiliki Fouka

  3. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Vasiliki Fouka & Marco Tabellini

  4. Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, UK

    Vasiliki Fouka & Marco Tabellini

  5. Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA

    Marco Tabellini

  6. Institute of Labor Economics, Berlin, Germany

    Marco Tabellini

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Correspondence to Mina Cikara.

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Source Data Fig. 1

Data from the FBI and US Census for Fig. 1.

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Data from the FBI and US Census for Fig. 3.

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Cikara, M., Fouka, V. & Tabellini, M. Hate crime towards minoritized groups increases as they increase in sized-based rank. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1537–1544 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01416-5

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