Psychology of the social capital of a multicultural society
The first research seminar of this year within series "Culture Matters" was held on January 19th. The report "Psychology of the social capital of a multicultural society" was made by Alexander Tatarko, senior researcher of the ILSCR.
The concept of "social capital" has appeared in social psychology relatively recently. Social capital creates the environment in which human capital can be fully realized. Social and human capital are the key resources for development of non-oil economies. Therefore, issues related to the study of mechanisms of its formation, the factors that influence it, as well as mechanisms for its operation or impact on the economic behavior of people are extremely relevant for today's Russia, where indicators of social capital are still low compared to many other developed countries.
Social capital in a multicultural society is defined as a system of socio-psychological resource that belongs to intra-and inter-group relations, able to increase the productivity of targeted action groups (including ethnic), without leading to an imbalance of the whole social system. The psychological structure of social capital includes the following elements: generalized (global) trust and institutional confidence, civil identity, which is estimated in two ways: valence (emotional component) and severity (cognitive component); norms of tolerance as the basic rules of relationships in a multicultural society which include tolerance to the representatives of alien ethnic and religious groups, and "perceived" social capital – evaluation of mutual support and equality.
Social capital influences economic development: the existence of social capital contributes to economic growth, increases the share of investment in GDP, reduces income inequality. The influence of social capital on the economy is not direct: there are indirect social and psychological phenomena, such as the attitudes and views of individual and group which govern behavior of people, and in particular economic behavior. Economic behavior in turn is associated with the economic activity of citizens and in many ways (along with other objective economic factors) affects the economy. Social capital also has a positive effect on mental and physical health: it is negatively associated with the frequency of smoking and it reduces the level of depression.
There are cross-cultural differences in the components of the psychological structure of social capital. Differences are observed not only between countries but between ethnic groups within a country. The attribution of social capital to immediate social environment is similar across ethnic groups. Significant differences were observed when assigning the level of social capital to the institutional sphere of society. Representatives of different ethnic groups attributed significantly different levels of social capital to the same social institutions.
The studies of Alexander Tatarko show that social capital affects the monetary attitudes and is associated with many socio-economic views. The main factor of the social capital in Russian multicultural society is a civic identity (especially in Russian ethnic group). Characteristics of Russian civil identity have the large number of interactions with socio-economic attitudes, perceptions, attitudes to economic realities. This pattern manifested itself in various samples of Russians in the studies of 2005-2011.
Olga Pavlenko
Trainee researcher