If you are one of us: Trust and reciprocity between in and out-group members in the context of the migration crisis

Increasing diversity of societies across Europe caused by the unparalleled inflow of immigrants in recent years has renewed academic interest in the relation between diversity and trust. Research consistently shows that trust is a social resource necessary to enable successful cooperation, exchange and delivery of public goods. Survey research has pointed to the detrimental effect of ethnic diversity on trust, yet there is a growing body of literature showing that the underpinning mechanism is the unequal socio-economic status between the in and out-group members – rather than their cultural distinctiveness. Cross-national experimental research on trust and reciprocity has demonstrated that out-group status defined in terms of national membership significantly decreases propensity to cooperate; yet trust and reciprocity are also sensitive to social status. This raises questions about the effect of intersectionality between ethnic in/out-group membership and social status on trust. Immigrants of a second and first generation may be seen as a form of stratification in terms of socio-economic and political position. We take these categories as a form of a variation of distance between the native majority (the in-group) and the consecutive ethnic out-groups and test their relevance for cooperation in a two-wave on-line experiment that follows a conjoint design.