Study: Diversity + Proximity = Legislative War

Drop another social science study on the pile of studies affirming the CH maxim that diversity + proximity = war (by whichever means).

Keep your enemies close? Greater proximity to opponents leads to more polarization.

Encouraging adversaries to have more interpersonal contact to find common ground may work on occasion, but not necessarily in the U.S. Senate, according to new research.

In their study, “Pulling Closer and Moving Apart: Interaction, Identity, and Influence in the U.S. Senate, 1973 to 2009,” which appears in the February issue of the American Sociological Review, Sameer B. Srivastava, assistant professor, Haas Management of Organizations Group at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Christopher C. Liu, assistant professor of strategy at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, studied the interactions among U.S. senators from the 1970s to the 2000s.

A pattern emerged. Senators either moved closer together or further apart in their voting behavior as a function of their political identities and how much contact they had with each other. This pattern was especially pronounced when contact occurred in Senate committees that were more divided.

“Conventional wisdom says interpersonal contact between people will foster collaboration and consensus,” says Srivastava. “We found that increasing physical contact between people who have opposing and public political identities can instead promote divergence of attitudes or behavior. This tendency is further amplified in environments involving high conflict, which makes political identities more salient.”

“Co-location can induce both positive and negative outcomes. Sometimes keeping some distance is the better option,” says Liu.

A billion white leftoid SWPLs would weep, except they already agreed with the conclusions of this study and others like it when they skedaddled for white hipster enclaves and white suburbs with white majority schools.

This latest result belying the “diversity is our strength” mantra is in line with Putnam’s previous finding that trust within communities decreased as ethnic and racial diversity increased. Just like regular people, politicians don’t want to be around strange, irritating foreigners for long.

Of all the stupid acts of malice elite white leftoids have perpetrated upon America, when the dust settles on District Yankeeland it will be the opening of the borders to the nonwhite world and the shitting in the faces of core middle class whites that will chasten them the most. That is, if there is any integrity left in them.