Chapter 4. Does ethnic heterogeneity of clubs affect member dropout? 85 categories might form the basis for group threat and conflict, socially categorizing oneself and others also fulfils important psychological needs. Hogg (2009) notes that social categories contain important prescriptive information. They give us a rough idea how one belonging to that category should feel and behave. Applying them to ourselves provides us with ‘a sense of identification and belonging’ and in conjunction with others leads to the ‘support for and validation of one’s identity, attitudes, and actions’ (p. 222). Due to their prescriptive nature, social categorizations also help us to gauge the feelings and actions of others and help us with predicting how they will interact with us. Hogg explains that in this way social categorization of ourselves and others plays a key role in suppressing a highly aversive psychological state of being by ‘reducing uncertainty about who one is, how one should behave, and how one will be treated by others’ (p. 222). Given the saliency of ethnic categories, contexts which are highly diverse in terms of ethnic backgrounds might be especially inducive of these feelings of uncertainty. Important about all three mechanisms is that they scale in the same way. Namely the cost-benefit ratio, network closure and feelings of uncertainty all increase with the number of ethnic differences one encounters in a group setting. Consequently, together, they suggest the reversal of the intergroup threat hypothesis by assuming that it is a highly fractured outgroup which leads to the most dropout, not a homogeneous one. In this case we should find that: H5: Ethnic outgroup fractionalization is positively associated with dropout Majority and minority differences While so far, I have assumed that these effects are universal across groups, it can be argued that this fails to account for a fundamental difference between the daily lives of citizens with a minority background and those with a majority ethnic background – especially in quasi-monoethnic contexts. In contrast to members of the majority group, minorities seldom have the luxury to keep mostly to ingroup members. This low availability of ethnic homogeneous settings could mean that on average the threshold for minorities to drop out is higher than for the members of the majority group. Moreover, minority members tend to have vastly more direct and indirect contact experiences with their outgroup than their majority counterparts. While this may very well just be a byproduct of each respective groups’ ability to realize homophilic preferences, this difference in outgroup
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