Inductivist

The General Social Survey asked respondents, "When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are? Answers ranged from very important (4) to not important at all (1).  They were also asked about how generally happy they are these days with answers ranging from very happy (3) to not too happy (1). Here are the means for happiness listed by level of ethnic identification (sample size = 1,087):

Mean happiness

How important is your ethnicity?
Very   2.28
Moderate   2.23

Does loyalty to one group you belong to predict loyalty to other groups?  I suspect that religious people are also more likely to value their ethnicity.  The General Social Survey (GSS) asked people how important their ethnicity is to them with answers ranging from unimportant (1) to very important (4). 

I categorized people as not religious if they attend religious services no more than once per year. All others I lumped into the religious group. The means for thinking ethnicity is important to you are listed below--the means for the religious in parentheses, the means for the irreligious without parentheses (sample size = 2,110)

"My ethnicity is important to me"-- means

American Indian  3.50  (3.50)
Black  3.47  (3.53)
Chinese  3.40  (3.75)
Mexican  3.22  (3.47)
Puerto Rican  3.19  (3.60)
Italian  2.85  (2.72)
Jewish  2.76  (3.26)

Total  Sample  2.60  (2.84)

Scottish  2.55  (2.44)
Irish  2.45  (2.60)
German  2.35  (2.50)
Swedish  2.29  (2.67)
Russian  2.25  (2.95)
English/Welsh  2.21 (2.50)
Polish  2.13  (2.67)

For most of the ethnic groups, ethnocentrism is higher for the religious group. The differences are generally not large but look, for example, at how religious Swedes are almost as ethnocentric as secular Jews.

The difference at the extremes is large: the gap between religious Chinese Americans on the high end and the irreligious Poles on the bottom is well over one standard deviation. The typical Chinese person who goes to church says his ethnicity is 'moderately' or 'very important.' Compare that to the average Polish American who is not religious: he says his ethnicity is 'slightly important.'

This year is the 15th anniversary of the publication of The Jewish Century, a very honest and insightful book by Jewish scholar Yuri Slezkine. Among many other things, Slezkine claims that the Jewish diaspora, compared with majority national groups, has identified more with the tribe and the international community and less with the nation-state.  According to him, when Jews tried to become nationalists, they dominated the highest rungs but, in the end, were rejected as interlopers. 

So, what's the situation in the US now?  Compared to other Americans, do Jews identify more as global citizens and less as Americans?  In 2014, General Social Survey (GSS) respondents were asked, "How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement? I feel more like a citizen of the world than of any country."  I excluded immigrants (sample size = 1,065).  Answers ranged from "strongly disagree" (scored as a 1) to "strongly agree" (scored as a 5).  Here are the means by religious affiliation:

Mean "Citizen of the World" Score

Buddhist   3.00
No affiliation   2.81
Catholic  2.67

Total Sample  2.66

Christian   2.63
Protestant  2.61
Jewish   2.12

Of the groups large enough to include in the list (10 or more respondents), Buddhists and the unaffiliated have the highest globalist scores, while Jews are actually at the bottom of the list.  The gap between the highest and lowest groups is nine-tenths of a standard deviation.  That's a large difference.  According to GSS data, Jews are real patriots.

I showed recently that Americans overwhelming select someone of the same race for a best friend.  Friendship is a good measure of how well groups are mixing, or, on the other hand, how much they cluster.

In this post, let's focus on religion. Does your best friend share your religious affiliation?  I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to answer this question (sample size = 1,932).  Here are the percentages who indicated a religious match between themselves and their best friend:

Percent whose best friend belongs to the same religion

Jews  75.6
Protestants  74.5
Catholics   59.4
None  42.3

Jews emerge as the group that clusters the most.  You might respond that Protestants have basically the same number, but we would expect a high number for a such a large group.  According to the latest GSS, 48.9% of Americans are Protestant, 23.3% are None, 21.2% are Catholic, and 1.7% are Jewish. If Protestants picked their friends at random, their best friend would also be Protestant around half the time. For Jews, a random process would give a Jewish best friend less than 2 percent of the time, and yet the number is over 75%.  This shows an intense level of clustering among Jews.

We saw in the last post that religious blacks, compared to their irreligious counterparts, say their racial identity is more important to them.  Does this pattern apply to whites?

I suspect the General Social Survey question is not interpreted the same by whites as blacks. It asks about ethnic identity, and I would guess whites are more likely to respond with something like, "Sure my Irishness is important."  Only a certain percentage probably interpret the question racially.

Anyway, here's what we get when we calculate mean ethnocentricity scores by church attendance (N = 2,167):
















Being ethnocentric peaks for whites who attend 2-3 times per month.  By contrast, it bottoms out among those who never go to church AND those who go more than weekly.

Racially-minded whites often say that Christianity is a problem since it encourages color-blindism, but that only seems to be the case for the small share of highly religious people.  And the complete absence of religious activity is correlated with less ethnocentrism.  Moderate religiosity seems to go hand-in-hand with ethnic loyalty. 

By the way, the difference between the top and bottom group is roughly 40% of standard deviation, so it's a moderate-size gap.

NOTE: Notice how I tend to handle these topics as a scholar should, while actual scholars do not.  I use fairly neutral terms like "ethnocentric" for both blacks and whites, while elite scholars use terms like "black pride" and "racial self-esteem" for blacks, and when the same question is analyzed for whites, terms like "hatred, "racism," "white supremacism," and "hate groups" are used. These "scholars" are frauds and should be ashamed of themselves.

If you didn't know better, you might assume that blacks who are conservative or religious might be less race conscious than their black counterparts.  You might assume that religion and conservatism might nudge blacks toward the ideal of color blindness, or that loyalty to one group might reduce loyalty to another.  Wrong.

The General Social Survey asked blacks on a scale from 1 to 4 how important their ethnicity was to their sense of who they are.  Here is a graph showing means scores of this question by political orientation:
















While ethnocentrism does not rise smoothly with conservatism, blacks who describe themselves as extremely conservative are the most black-centric group.  So don't think that a black right-winger wants to forget about race.

Let's look a ethnocentrism by church attendance:
















The effect is not strong, but there is a tendency for more religious blacks to focus more on race identity, rather than the fact we are all children of God.

How do we explain this (admittedly weak) pattern?  (Keep in mind that mean ethnocentrism is so high for blacks of any category, there isn't much variation to explain.) Perhaps it's due to a liberal tendency to see oneself as a citizen of the world, while conservatives might be more comfortable with local loyalties. 

I recently presented evidence that non-whites tend to be clannish because they are non-white, not because they are outnumbered. But I also mentioned that there is variation among whites. This is consistent with bloggers hbd chick  and JayMan who stress that not all Europeans are the same, and that the Hajnal line divides them.

Using the General Social survey question ("When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?" 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very) I calculated the mean score for various white groups:

Using General Social Survey day, I've shown before that non-white Americans are much more ethnocentric or clannish than whites.

Now this could be due to whites, especially those with ancestors from northwestern Europe, being more universalistic than other groups, or it could be due to the self-consciousness that comes from being in a very small group. You feel surrounded, so you stick together. This would mean that tiny whites groups would be clannish, too. Are Greek Americans, for example, somewhat clannish because they are a tiny slice of America, or because they are naturally ethnocentric?

I looked at this by creating a variable for ethnic group size. The group was scored 1, 2, or 3 depending on whether it was small, medium, or large.  English, Italians, and Finns, respectively, serve as examples.

Next, I regressed how important your ethnic group is to you on to variables I thought might be related to clannishness.  Here I show the standardized OLS coefficients (sample size = 1,959):

Importance of ethnic group to you

Age   .10***
Male   .00
Non-white  .32***
Immigrant   .06*
City size  .02   
Education   -.03
Ethnic group size  .03

The variables that significantly predict clannishness from strongest to weakest are: non-white, being older, and being an immigrant. The other variables, including ethnic group size, don't matter.

(For age, perhaps people tend to "come home" as they get older, similar to what you see with religious involvement.)

So non-whites are not clannish because they're small and thus feel they need to stick together; rather, they are ethnocentric because that's who they are. Whites tend to be universalistic because that's who they are.

This has implications for assimilation. Evidently, non-whites will remain clannish even after being here for generations, as blacks and Native Americans have done. (I should mention that there is variation: according to GSS data, Japanese Americans are not ethnocentric, while Orthodox Jews are.)

If you want immigrants to become true blue Americans with no other loyalties, invite whites to move here.

In a recent post, I found that race predicts political orientation more strongly than does income for many minority groups. It seems to me that the race/politics link, adjusted for the influence of income, is an indication of the importance of race to that particular group.  If members always look at issues through the lens of their racial group, they will tend to vote in the same way and will vote Democrat, regardless of how wealthy they are.

Based on this line of reasoning, here is a ranking of the most race-loyal, race-conscious (if they were white, the term would be race-ist) minority groups.

Race-consciousness ranking
1. Blacks
2. Mexicans
3. Jews
3. Asian Indians
5. Puerto Ricans
6. American Indians
7. Chinese
7. West Indians
9. Japanese
10. Arabs

Not surprisingly, blacks are the most race-conscious group, but it's interesting that West Indians are much less so. Since Jews are white, you might not expect them them to be ethnocentric at all, but they outrank many nonwhite groups.

Asian Indians are quite race-conscious, as are Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (to their own group, not to the fake category of "Hispanic"). Despite being non-white, Chinese and Japanese Americans seem to be less uptight about race. Arabs are even less ethnocentric. (Keep in mind that many of these Arabs are Christians.)

Reading Defending the Master Race by Jewish historian Jonathan Spiro--a biography of eugenicist Madison Grant--I'm struck by how odd reality is. The book documents how WASP elites like Grant succeeded in bringing immigration to a halt in the mid-1920s, and how a desire to stop Jewish immigration was at the center of their concerns.

WASP scientists from the most elite institutions were convinced that Jews were dumb, illiterate, culturally backward, unclean, genetically inferior, and unassimilable. Recent scholarship shows that these scientists were zero out of six. They were wrong about so many characteristics, but at the same time, many Jews did join with others to eventually turn the country into a PC basketcase. Jews did help change the country in ways that men like Grant wouldn't have wanted. (Of course, they also contributed positively in many unexpected ways.) So how do we explain that, on the one hand, the restrictionists were so wrong about Jews, but, on the other, there was something to their fears? 

My hunch is that people feel something in the gut, and then try to explain it to themselves in a rational way. Madison Grant saw all these guys from Poland dressed in weird clothes, speaking a foreign language, and he sensed in his mammalian brain that something wasn't quite right. Ordinary ethnocentrism and wariness of the stranger is enough to lead a person to biased thinking, but add to it all to a sense of WASP superiority and a respect for science, and you end up with a pseudoscience about the inferiority of the Jew. 

I mean, after all, I wouldn't expect a person like Grant to see lowly bearded aliens as people who were as capable as himself. He rationalized his gut feeling of wariness into a fantasy of the inferior, verminous Jew.

It might be argued that elite WASPs knew very well that Jews were a strong, not a weak, group, and knew that many of these folks would some day pass them by. It could be a case of conscious ethnic competition, but I don't see it. (References to the contrary would be appreciated.) These elites really seemed to believe their own propaganda.

I suppose there are a couple of lessons to be learned. First, it is really hard to do objective science. Spiro tells a tale of Old American bias, and I harp all the time on the current leftist bias by mainstream social science. Objectivity is much more the exception than the rule. Second, gut reactions probably tell you something, but the useful message is not so obvious, and it is likely to be self-serving. On the other hand, if you're the dominant group, and you don't want that position to slip, you might want to follow your gut.

I see that the question of Jewish ethnocentrism has been raised again in HBD World, so I thought I would look at it from another angle with the MIDUS Study. Participants were asked: "How important do you think it is for people of your religion to marry people who are the same religion?" Answers ranged from "very" (4) to "not at all" (1). Here are the means by affiliation:


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Jews are between members of sects and denominations in the importance they place on marrying within the faith. The differences on the table are striking. For example, the gap between the means for Jews and Unitarians is 1.4 standard deviations--a huge difference.
 
I include the standard deviations as a measure of agreement within each group. Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs) and Unitarians have two of the lowest numbers: this indicates that JWs have a comparatively high level of agreement that they should marry other JWs, while Unitarians agree that endogamy is unimportant. You can see that the SD for Jews is high, which indicates a broad diversity of opinion on the question. So Jews are comparatively "religiocentric" but not monolithic.

A reader in the last post on ethnocentrism rightly suggests that people might get confused by my analysis. It showed that, for whites, believing that your ethnicity is important to who you are is (weakly) associated with cooler feelings toward other groups.

The largest negative correlation is Jews toward whites which could be interpreted to mean that Jewish folks like whites less than other groups. That is incorrect: the negative correlation means that Jewish ethnocentrism predicts cooler outgroup feelings better than other ethnocentrisms. In other words, when it comes to disliking others, there is a sharper difference between ethnocentric and non-ethnoncentric Jews than their counterparts in other groups. The correlation says nothing about average levels of coolness. Here is the mean coolness score toward whites listed by one's ethnic group.


Mean coolness score toward whites

Filipino 3.53
Amerindian 3.49
Black 3.36
Chinese 3.21
Asian Indian 3.10
Scottish 2.90
Swedish 2.80
English/Welsh 2.78
Russian 2.77
Mexican 2.77
German 2.71
Irish 2.52
Puerto Rican 2.43
Polish 2.28
Jewish 2.28
Arabic 2.12

Asians, Amerindians, and blacks like whites the least. The difference between the Filipino and Jewish means, for example, is eight-tenths of a standard deviation--a big difference. But even Filipinos--the coolest group--have a pretty warm average. Respondents could give any answer between "very warm" (1) and "very cool" (9), so 3.5 is still pretty warm.

The Midlife Development in the United States Study asked Americans how important it is for members of their ethnic group to marry inside the group. Here are the percentages who said "very important" or "somewhat important" (N = 4,881): 

Jewish 47.4
Asian 42.3
Amerindian 37.3
Black 34.6
Hispanic 33.8
English 28.4
French 19.7
Italian 19.1
Scottish 18.5
Irish 18.3
Polish 16.3
German 16.0
Swedish 15.8
Norwegian 15.2

Non-whites and especially Jewish Americans have high numbers. 

As a follow-up to the last post on race and preferring the company of one's own, I wanted to take a look at variation among white groups. Listed below are the percent who answered that they did not prefer their own group "at all" by ethnicity (N = 4,478):

Percent
English 32.8*
French 53.4
German 50.3
Irish 38.5* 
Italian 28.5*
Polish 37.7*
Scottish 41.3
Swedish 45.9
Russian 37.5
Norwegian 42.7
Jewish 20.2*

*significantly different from German Americans at the 95% confidence level

I chose German Americans as the reference group since they are large and score second highest (after French Americans) on this measure of neutrality. Surprisingly, Irish Americans are a bit more neutral than those of English descent. Jewish Americans, by contrast, score in the non-white range (from the previous post, Native Americans are 20 percent).

The study of Midlife Development in the United States (2004-06) asked 4,759 people if they prefer to be with other people of the same ethnic group. Here are the percentages who said "not at all."


Percent
White 38.8
Black 6.5*
Native American 20.0*
Asian 7.4*
Hispanic 16.2*

*significantly different from whites at the 95% confidence level

All non-white groups are more likely than whites to prefer the company of their own. Whites are six times more likely than blacks to have a non-preferential attitude.  

Steve Sailer asks: "Is there anyway to look at cohorts over time to see if ethnocentrism increases with age? I suspect ethnocentrism sets in more when you start thinking about grandchildren, but that's just a guess."

The GSS question on one's closeness to his ethnic group (ETHCLOSE) was asked in 1996 and 2004. I calculated the mean score for all whites in their 50s in 1996 and got 2.84. Next, I computed the mean for people ages 58-67 in 2004 (since the earlier group had aged 8 years). Their mean is 3.12, almost one-third of a standard deviation higher. The difference is not quite significant at the two-tailed 95% confidence level, but the small samples (143 and 137) do not help.

I take this as evidence that Steve is right: tribalism rises as you reach the age when grandchildren are in your thoughts.  

I found evidence that Jewish Americans as a group are not hypocritical over issues of ethnocentrism. The table above reproduces the ethnocentrism scores I calculated in the earlier post. Groups with above-average scores I labeled "ethnocentrics". Groups with scores below the mean are called "individualists."

Next, I found this question:  "Some people say that it is better for America if different racial and ethnic groups maintain their distinct cultures. Others say that it is better if groups change so that they blend into the larger society as in the idea of a melting pot. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that racial and ethnic groups should maintain their distinct cultures, and a score fo 7 as meaning that groups should change so that they blend into the larger society. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?"

The means are shown in the right column. Those above the mean are categorized as "multiculturalists," while those below are labeled "assimilationists."  All the groups, including Jews, are consistent. What Jews tend to favor is a society where ethnic traditions are maintained. They are ethnocentric multiculturalists.

So where does that leave so many Americans whose families have been here for many generations, with ancestors from several different countries, who belong to no particular ethnic group? You can see that most white Americans are individualist assimilationists, but that attitude seems so 1950s.

If the country follows the route favored by many Jews and other minority groups, the natural path for these other folks is to organize as white Americans NOA--not otherwise allied. These people have no culture, history or heritage other than a white American one. The country does seem to be headed in a multicultual direction, especially when you consider massive Hispanic immigration mixed with a multiculturalist elite, but I don't think an America with tens of millions of tribalist white people is quite what multiculturalists have in mind.


UPDATE: Oops--I missed that Americans of Polish and French descent are individualist multiculturalists.