Who is part of "us"?

Openness to Other: A personality trait for intergroup relations

Intergroup relations have been present throughout human history, so people should develop facets of personality for managing these relations.
Yet, the dominant conception of personality, the Big Five, does not feature personality constructs clearly relevant to intergroup relations.
To rectify this issue, my advisor, Oliver John, and I introduce Openness to Other (O2), a novel facet of Openness to Experience that describes people's appreciation, embrace of, and preference for others who are different.
We developed a 10-item self-report scale to measure O2 (e.g., "I appreciate a wide range of cultural perspectives; they help me understand people's feelings and actions and guide my behavior toward people that are different.") and showed that O2 related to the Big Five, broad values (e.g., social justice, equal opportunity for all), beliefs about immigration, and peer reports of intergroup behavior in expected ways.

People tend to form relationships with people from their own racial groups, a phenomenon called racial homophily.
Racial homophily, as a form of reduced interracial contact, can pose problems, such as exacerbating prejudice and inequality.
Traditionally, racial homophily has been viewed as arising from structural factors in the environment, like base rates of groups.
Here, we focus on personality factors and test the hypothesis that individual differences in racial homophily exist, are substantial, and can be predicted from Agreeableness, Openness, and Openness to Other (O2; a novel, interpersonal facet of Openness).
Across several datasets, my advisor, Oliver John, and I repeatedly found that people who were more open—in particular, more open to other—had almost equal numbers of different- and same-race network members, whereas people who were less open (to other) had four times as many same- as different-race network members; importantly, O2’s effect was not accounted for by several alternative explanations (e.g., base rates, other personality traits).

For a very short presentation of this work, please see here.

Although racial homophily is a well-established feature of personal networks in the U.S., the roles that different-race contacts occupy when they do enter personal networks are not well understood, nor are the origins of same- and different-race contacts or differences in the quality of these relationships
Prior work has largely focused on schoolchildren's networks and found mixed results, or it has focused on only a single role, marriage, finding that adults tend to marry same-race adults.
With a unique, longitudinal dataset of younger and older adults living in the Bay Area, my collaborator Claude Fischer and I examined the roles, origins, and qualities of same- and different-race contacts in personal networks.
Different-race contacts, compared to same-race contacts, were "around but not close": Different-race contacts were met in larger contexts (e.g., college, religion, online vs. growing up in same neighborhood), occupied more casual, distal roles (e.g., housemate, coworker vs. spouse, family member), and were felt less close to across a variety of dimensions (e.g., how long known, less talking on phone, feel less obligated to help).
There were individual differences in each of these common effects, with some people (i.e., those who started families across racial lines) engaging in more numerous and more stable rates of cross-race contact than other people.

For a short presentation of this work, please see here.