Avatar

Johanna Gereke

research fellow at MZES

Mannheim Centre for European Social Research

About me

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). My current research focuses on intergroup relations, migration, discrimination and cooperative behavior in modern societies. Other research projects examine biased beliefs and superstitions in migration decision-making, the link between physical attractiveness and immigrants’ integration outcomes and the relationship between unemployment, poverty and prosociality, political engagement and trust. My research draws on a range of experimental and quasi-experimental methods, including original lab-in-the-field, survey and field experiments.

Prior to joining the MZES, I held a postdoctoral position at the Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. I hold a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

I have recently been awarded a Junior Fellowship for Innovation in Teaching from the Baden-Würrtemberg Foundation for my course project “Replication & Reproduction in the Social Sciences” (2020-2022). Since 2021 I am a member of “Die Junge Akademie” a joint project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Together with Prof. Reinhard Schunck (University of Wuppertal), I am the PI of the newly-funded research project “Pretty Integrated? Perceptions of immigrants’ physical attractiveness and consequences for integration outcomes” financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (2021-2024).

Interests

  • intergroup relations
  • migration
  • discrimination
  • trust and cooperation
  • poverty and inequality

Education

  • Postdoctoral researcher at the Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, 2018

    Bocconi University in Milan, Italy

  • Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences, 2016

    European University Institute in Florence, Italy

Research In Progress

Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces:A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro

N. Zhang, J. Gereke, D. Baldassarri Jul 2020
Discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities remains widespread acrossEuropean countries. While a large scholarship has documented ethno-racial discrimi-nation in institutional settings such housing and labor markets, we know little aboutwhat drives discrimination across a broader range of day-to-day encounters. This studyreports results from a large-scale field experiment examining the physical avoidance ofimmigrants as an unobtrusive yet important measure of everyday discrimination inItaly. By varying confederates’ race as well as signals of socioeconomic status (busi-ness vs. casual attire), we can additionally shed light on the mechanisms underlyingdiscriminatory patterns. We find that natives are averse to contact with Nigerian con-federates, but do not discriminate against Chinese confederates. Further, manipulatingconfederates’ dress to signal high socioeconomic status has little effect on natives’ be-havior. We discuss the implications of these findings for improving interracial contactin diverse societies.

Migration, Magic, and the Risk of Dying: Evidence from real-time migration decisions in The Gambia

Johanna Gereke, Daniel Auer (WZB) and Max Schaub (WZB) Jul 2020
Beliefs in magic and superstitions have been observed to influence a range of outcomes, including warfare, business and electoral choice. In the context of migration, previous studies have documented the ubiquity of superstitious beliefs in influencing when, where and how aspiring migrants decide to undertake their journeys abroad. Building on these findings, this study empirically investigates whether magical and superstitious beliefs influence the decision to migrate using an original longitudinal data set. We do so in the context of The Gambia, which has seen some of the highest migration rates in the world in recent years. We hypothesize that magical beliefs make individuals likely to underestimate the risk of the migratory journey, and make them more trusting of smugglers, who often betray this trust. In order to test these hypotheses, we ask 10,000 potential migrants who will be re-interviewed several times during a 6-months period. This allows us to observe actual migration decisions, and to link these to beliefs in magic, risk attitudes and trust perceptions.

Does poverty reduce prosociality and political engagement?

Max Schaub, Johanna Gereke, and Delia Baldassarri Jul 2020
The following pre-analysis plan describes two projects that investigate for the effect of poverty on I) prosociality, and II) political engagement. With the projects, we continue our research agenda on poverty, diversity and cooperation (Schaub, Gereke, and Baldassarri 2019). The two projects are closely linked as they draw on the same data collection effort and share the same treatment definition and some of the outcome measures. They are distinct, however, in terms of the concepts invoked. The pre-analysis plan therefore starts by. introducing common design features. After that, the outcome measures and other specificities for each project are described separately.

Publications

N. Zhang, J. Gereke, D. Baldassarri (n.d.). Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces: A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro

European Sociological Review Feb 2022
A large scholarship documents discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities in institutional settings such as labour and housing markets in Europe. We know less, however, about discrimination in informal and unstructured everyday encounters. To address this gap, we report results from a large-scale field experiment examining the physical avoidance of immigrants as an unobtrusive yet important measure of everyday discrimination in a multiethnic European metropolis. In addition to varying confederates’ migration background and race, we also vary signals of status (business versus casual attire) in order to shed light on the mechanisms underlying discriminatory patterns. We find that natives are averse to contact with Nigerian confederates, but do not discriminate against Chinese confederates. Furthermore, manipulating confederates’ attire has little effect on natives’ behaviour. Overall, our results highlight the everyday burdens borne particularly by individuals of African descent in commonplace, ‘street-level’ encounters.

J. Gereke, M. Schaub, D. Baldassarri (n.d.). Immigration, integration and cooperation: experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Jul 2021
Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower their cooperativeness in response to the presence of non-coethnics, they could also be explained by composition effects – immigrants having different baseline levels of cooperativeness, and thereby lowering average cooperation rates. To disentangle these effects, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with a sample of Italians and immigrants from Morocco and the Philippines residing in Milan. In our public goods experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either homogeneous or ethnically mixed groups. We find that Italians behave similarly in both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups, thus contradicting arguments about the negative effects of diversity on the native population, while there are both compositional and interactional effects when considering the behaviour of Moroccan and Filipino immigrants, respectively. Moreover, differences largely disappear when we consider only the behaviour of more socio-economically integrated immigrants, highlighting the need for a more processual understanding of cooperation in multiethnic communities.

M. Schaub, J. Gereke, D. Baldassarri (2021). Strangers in Hostile Lands: Exposure to Refugees and Right-wing Support

Comparative Political Studies, 54(3-4), 686-717 Sep 2020
Does local exposure to refugees affect right-wing support and anti-immigrant sentiments? This paper studies the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of Eastern Germany during the refugee crisis of 2015. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has seen a major shift towards the political right, despite minimal previous exposure to foreigners. We draw on electoral records and original data collected among 1,320 German citizens from 236 municipalities, half of which received refugees. Two conditions allow for causal identification: a policy allocating refugees following strict administrative rules, and a matching procedure rendering treated and control municipalities statistically indistinguishable. Our survey and behavioral measures confirm the presence of widespread anti-immigrant sentiments, but these are entirely unaffected by the presence of refugees in respondents’ hometowns. If anything, local exposure to refugees served as a ‘reality check’, pulling both right- and left-leaning individuals more towards the center.

J. Gereke, M. Schaub, D. Baldassarri. Gendered discrimination against immigrants: experimental evidence

Frontiers in Sociology, 5, 59. Sep 2020
Recent migration from Muslim-majority countries has sparked discussions across Europe about the supposed threat posed by new immigrants. Young men make up the largest share of newly arrived immigrants and this demographic is often perceived to be particularly threatening. In this article, we compare pro-sociality and trust towards immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, focusing on gender differences in treatment. We study these questions using behavioral games that measure strategic (trusting) and non-strategic (pro-social) behavior. Our data comes from measures embedded in a large survey of residents of Germany’s eastern regions, where anti-immigrant sentiments are high. We find that Germans are similarly pro-social toward immigrant men and women in non-strategic situations, but are significantly less likely to trust immigrant men (but not women) in strategic encounters. These findings provide evidence that immigrants’ gender can be an important factor conditioning the behavior of the majority population, but also caution that (gendered) ethnic discrimination may be situationally dependent. Future research should further examine the exact mechanisms underlying this variation in discriminatory behavior.

Gereke, J., & Gërxhani, K. Experimental Economics and Experimental Sociology

Oxford research encyclopedia: economics and finance. Nov 2019
Experimental economics has moved beyond the traditional focus on market mechanisms and the “invisible hand” by applying sociological and socio-psychological knowledge in the study of rationality, markets, and efficiency. This knowledge includes social preferences, social norms, and cross-cultural variation in motivations. In turn, the renewed in­ terest in causation, social mechanisms, and middle-range theories in sociology has led to a renaissance of research employing experimental methods. This includes laboratory experiments but also a wide range of field experiments with diverse samples and settings. By focusing on a set of research topics that have proven to be of substantive interest to both disciplines—cooperation in social dilemmas, trust and trustworthiness, and social norms—this article highlights innovative interdisciplinary research that connects experimental economics with experimental sociology. Experimental economics and experimental sociology can still learn much from each other, providing economists and sociologists with an opportunity to collaborate and advance knowledge on a range of underexplored topics of interest to both disciplines.

Schaub, M., Gereke, J., & Baldassarri, D. (2020). Does Poverty Undermine Cooperation in Multiethnic Settings? Evidence from a Cooperative Investment Experiment.

Cambridge University Press, Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1-14. Jul 2019
What undermines cooperation in ethnically diverse communities? Scholars have focused on factors that explain the lack of inter-ethnic cooperation, such as prejudice or the difficulty to communicate and sanction across group boundaries. We direct attention to the fact that diverse communities are also often poor and ask whether poverty, rather than diversity, reduces cooperation. We developed a strategic cooperation game where we vary the income and racial identity of the interaction partner. We find that beliefs about how poor people behave have clear detrimental effects on cooperation: cooperation is lower when people are paired with low-income partners, and the effect is particularly strong when low-income people interact among themselves. We observe additional discrimination along racial lines when the interaction partner is poor. These findings imply that poverty and rising inequality may be a serious threat to social cohesion, especially under conditions of high socioeconomic segregation.

Gereke J, Schaub M, Baldassarri D (2018) Ethnic diversity, poverty and social trust in Germany: Evidence from a behavioral measure of trust.

PLoS ONE 13(7): e0199834. Jul 2018
Several scholars have concluded that ethnic diversity has negative consequences for social trust. However, recent research has called into question whether ethnic diversity per se has detrimental effects, or whether lower levels of trust in diverse communities simply reflect a higher concentration of less trusting groups, such as poor people, minorities, or immigrants. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of the German population (GSOEP), we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level–specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, in contrast to the majority of current research on ethnic diversity, we use a behavioral measure of trust in combination with fine-grained (zip-code level) contextual measures of ethnic composition and poverty. Furthermore, we are also able to compare the behavioral measure to a standard attitudinal trust question. We find that household poverty partially accounts for lower levels of trust, and that after controlling for income, German and non-German respondents are equally trusting. However, being surrounded by neighbors with immigrant background is also associated with lower levels of social trust.

Teaching

 
 
 
 
 

Workshop Instructor

German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

Oct 2019 – Oct 2019 Hamburg, Germany
 
 
 
 
 

Research Fellow

Mannheim Centre for European Social Research

Feb 2019 – Present Mannheim, Germany
 
 
 
 
 

Instructor Global Study Program

University of Cologne

Mar 2018 – Jul 2018 Cologne, Germany
 
 
 
 
 

Instructor

Heinrich-Heine University

Jun 2016 – Jul 2016 Düsseldorf, Germany
 
 
 
 
 

Teaching Assistant

European University Institute

Jan 2015 – Mar 2016 Florence, Italy

Skills

STATA

Qualtrics

LaTeX

OTree

German

native

English

fluent

French

intermediate

Italian

basic

Contact