How Durable are Social Norms? Immigrant Trust and Generosity in 132 Countries

Abstract

This paper estimates the global prevalence of social trust and generosity among immigrants. We combine individual and national level data from immigrants and native-born respondents in more than 130 countries, using seven waves of the Gallup World Poll (2005-2012). We find that migrants tend to make social trust assessments that mainly reflect conditions in the country where they now live, but they also reveal a significant influence from their countries of origin. The latter effect is one-third as important as the effect of local conditions. We also find that the altruistic behavior of migrants, as measured by the frequency of their donations in their new countries, is strongly determined by social norms in their new countries, while also retaining some effect of the levels of generosity found in their birth countries. To show that the durability of social norms is not simply due to a failure to recognize new circumstances, we demonstrate that there are no footprint effects for immigrants' confidence in political institutions. Taken together, these findings support the notion that social norms are deeply rooted in long-standing cultures, yet are nonetheless subject to adaptation when there are major changes in the surrounding circumstances and environment.

Ancestry Culture and Female Employment—An Analysis Using Second-Generation Siblings

“…Finseraas (2011, 2013)). Second, it is likely that the effects differ with respect to female employment, as the experiential perspective has been shown to be important for social trust (Dinesen 2013;Helliwell et al 2014;Nannestad et al 2014;Uslaner 2011), and as gender roles are particularly malleable to social relational contexts (Ridgeway and Correll 2004). We hope that future scholarship can investigate these interactions by combining the extended version of the epidemiological approach with well identified effect estimates of institutional change.…”

Acculturation and Expectations?: <i>Investigating Differences in Generalised Trust between Non-Western Immigrants and Ethnic Danes</i>

“…Many of these studies find some degree of support for both (for cross-national estimates of both influences, see e.g. Helliwell, Wang & Xu 2014). In other words, we are not necessarily discussing mutually exclusive theories.…”

“…There seems to be little doubt that when immigrants are compared to their countrymen staying behind in the country of origin, the different trust levels of the destination countries are (perhaps unsurprisingly) important when explaining immigrants' trust levels (Dinesen & Hooghe 2010;Helliwell, Wang & Xu 2014;Nannestad et al 2014). Such findings have often been associated with differences in the 'quality' of political institutions, particularly corruption, or other indicators that have been established to correlate with country-level trust.…”

“…The first explains differences between immigrants either across country contexts or by comparing immigrants from different countries in the same destination country. This approach capitalises on immigration as a natural experiment (Algan & Cahuc 2010;Dinesen 2011;Dinesen & Hooghe 2010;Helliwell, Wang & Xu 2014;Ljunge 2014;Moschion & Tabasso 2014;Nannestad et al 2014;Shaleva 2015;Uslaner 2008). The second and less-dominant approach is to explain differences between immigrants and the majority population or to compare explanatory factors across the same divide as in Kumlin & Rothstein (2010), Dinesen (2012), de Vroome, Hooghe & Marien (2013) or Koopmans & Veit (2014).…”

A Critical Evaluation of the Impact of Religion on Collectivist Families’ Meal Social Interaction Behaviour in Sierra Leone.

“…From these definitions, it is clear that the various theorists (Hofstede, 2001;De Mooij, 2013;and Helliwell et al, 2014) views culture in a similar way, as not only the characteristic of individuals, but rather as one that encompasses a number of people who have been conditioned by the same education and life experience. Hence, they believed that people are conditioned by their socio-cultural environment to act in a certain manner (De Mooij, 2013), and that culture cannot be separated from the individual.…”