Beyond Schelling: The Role of Attitudes toward In-group and Out-group Members in Ethnic Residential Settlement and Segregation

In this paper we explore the circumstances under which settlement processes lead to segregation through simulations of an artificial urban residential system with two racial/ethnic groups, using a recently developed statistical framework for modeling systems with complex dependencies (Butts, 2007). The study differs from previous research most importantly because it distinguish between in-group and out-group effects, through which we model the tendency for households to live close to, or far from, members of the same, or of a different, ethnic group. Previous studies using this modeling framework have shown that distinguishing between in-group preference (homophily) and out-group avoidance (xenophobia) is important, because the two mechanisms have different implications for the distribution of households across neighborhoods, and interact in non-trivial ways with other effects. Although this distinction has been employed by some researchers, the majority of recent residential segregation simulation studies employ the approach of Schelling (1971), which is based on neighborhood ethnic composition thresholds. We show here that homophily and xenophobia have the biggest segregating effect on residential systems when acting together. However, spatial residential patterns differ depending on whether one or both ethnic groups are homophilous, and the influence of homophily can be countered by even slight tendencies toward integration. The influence of xenophobia, on the other hand, is more pervasive, and can only be mitigated by equal or higher levels of in-group avoidance. Since high levels of in-group avoidance are likely to occur only in special circumstances, these results suggest that xenophobia may be the more important driver of segregation in most American settings, and that reducing xenophobia and encouraging integration is a more effective policy lever than reducing homophily.