How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown diverse others and the tendency toward homophily and in-group favoritism. We introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure that includes macrostructural conditions for intergroup encounters and microlevel dynamics of intergroup selection and interaction. Using lab-in-the-field experiments with a large representative sample of Italian natives and immigrants from the multiethnic city of Milan, we find that, when pushed to interact with non-coethnics, Italians generally treat them similarly to how they treat coethnics and value signs of social and market integration. However, when given the opportunity to select their interaction partners, Italians favor coethnics over immigrants. Taken together, these results help reconcile classical findings concerning the positive effects of intergroup contact with evidence documenting the persistence of out-group discrimination in selection processes.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in highly publicized attacks against members of minority groups. To date, scholarship has primarily focused on the tendency for such trigger events to generate violent aftershocks. However, we hypothesize that trigger events create a climate of fear that may also significantly impact minorities’ mental health and well-being. To test our conjuncture, we draw upon both national survey data as well as federal hate crime data in combination with a natural experiment involving the Unite the Right rally and vehicle attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. We first show that there was an increase in anti-Black hate crimes in the two weeks following Charlottesville. We also link the Charlottesville attack to an increase in stress about personal hate crime victimization among African-Americans. Interestingly, these results are confined to African-Americans, suggesting that both violent aftershocks and the general climate of fear may be racially bounded.

What is the relationship between classroom ethnic composition and patterns of ethnic friendship segregation amongst native and immigrant adolescents? In a 2016 AJS article, Smith et al. analyzed data on adolescents’ friendship networks from four European countries and found differential effects of classroom composition on natives’ and immigrants’ friendship choices. In this comment, we identify estimation problems in a large number of classroom networks included in Smith et al.’s original study. We demonstrate that immigrant homophily cannot be meaningfully estimated in many networks containing insufficient numbers of immigrant students from the same ethnic group. After accounting for these estimation problems at the network level, our re-analyis provides little evidence that classroom composition has differential effects for native and immigrant homophily.

How do the economic returns to physical attractiveness vary between immigrants and natives? Despite a growing literature on the beauty premium, previous scholarship has not examined whether the size of this premium might vary according to immigrant status, an important axis of social stratification in European societies. We study this question in the German labor market using longitudinal data from a large, randomly drawn nationwide sample that includes interviewer ratings of respondents’ physical attractiveness. Results from a multiverse analysis provide strong evidence of a beauty premium for native German men and women. However, we find mixed results for ethnic minority groups. These results highlight how perceived physical attractiveness is linked to labor market stratification.

We examine how trust and trustworthiness varies with the citizenship status of the alter in three democratic countries with varying sharres of immigrants and levels of economic development: the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland. Trust games were implemented in representative surveys. While we find significant differences in overall levels of trust and trustworthiness across countries, we do not find any significant differences in the degree to which participants trusted or reciprocated trust of interaction partners with the same vs. foreign citizenship status in any of the three countries. Our results suggest that citizenship status is not a salient identity marker to shape trust or trustworthiness in these types of interpersonal interactions.

Each year, several thousand migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa die attempting to reach Europe’s southern shores. Social scientists and policymakers have been puzzling over the question why so many people are prepared to take this extremely high risk of dying. Drawing on panel data from over 10,000 individuals in The Gambia, one of the countries with the highest emigration rates in the world, we show that cultural beliefs in terms of spiritual practices are strongly associated with a decreased perception of one’s own risk of dying on the migration journey. We find that consulting a healer for spiritual protection predicts migration plans and actual migration behavior.

In many Western societies, the current “native” majority will become a numerical minority sometime within the next century. How does prospective demographic change affect existing group boundaries? An influential recent article by Abascal (2020) showed that white Americans under demographic threat reacted with boundary contraction—that is, they were less likely to classify ambiguously white people as “white.” The present study examines the generalizability of these findings beyond the American context. Specifically, we test whether informing Germans about the projected decline of the “native” population without migration background affects the classification of phenotypically ambiguous individuals. Our results show that information about demographic change neither affects the definition of group boundaries nor generates negative feelings toward minority outgroups. These findings point to the relevance of contextual differences in shaping the conditions under which demographic change triggers group threat and boundary shifts..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

First impressions often hinge on visible cues, leading people to infer the trustworthiness of strangers from their appearance and dress. While religiosity is generally associated with greater perceived trustworthiness, little is known about how visible religious markers, such as clothing and grooming styles, shape trust judgments in Muslim-majority societies, where such signals are widespread and easily recognizable. We examine this question using a large-scale vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative face-to-face survey in Turkey. By experimentally varying profile characteristics, we identify the causal effect of a Muslim headscarf or beard on perceived trustworthiness. Contrary to expectations, individuals displaying these religious badges are generally viewed as less trustworthy than otherwise identical profiles, even by highly religious respondents. Mediation analyses show that these effects arise because religious badges signal multiple attributes, not only religiosity but also political orientation and physical attractiveness — and that these inferred meanings differ by gender: women’s headscarves and men’s beards prompt distinct patterns of inference. These findings show that visible religious markers shape trust judgments through multivalent social inferences rather than perceived piety alone. The results highlight how observers draw on broader social and political associations when interpreting religious markers, providing evidence on how public expressions of religion affect everyday trust judgments.

Increasing ethnic and religious diversity in many Western societies has sparked research on the consequences of this demographic change on intergroup relations. The impact of Muslim immigration in Europe has become a particularly salient topic in political debates. Yet, the effects of prospective immigrant population growth and the numerical increase of Muslims on group boundaries remain unclear. In this study, we examine how respondents belonging to the majority group react to information about demographic shifts, and how these shifts affect group boundaries using a survey experiment in Germany. Our results show that exposure to information about either a growing number of immigrants in general or specifically Muslims increases perceptions of threat among majority group members. This leads them to more frequently categorize individuals with ambiguous German / Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) features as likely having a migration background, particularly when the information specifically highlights the demographic increase of the Muslim population. However, the contraction of the group boundary in response to this information is modest. Further, the perceived status threat associated with demographic shifts leads to an increase in negative sentiments towards individuals perceived to have MENA physical characteristics. These findings contribute to a growing literature on the consequences of demographic change, the inclusion and discrimination of Muslim immigrant minorities, and the delineation of group boundaries in diverse European societies.

How do returns to physical attractiveness in the labour market vary depending on the alignment between an employee’s gender and the gender composition of their occupation? Research suggests that attractiveness often invokes gender-typical stereotypes. If these stereotypes imply a mismatch between what are considered to be necessary traits in an occupation and those which are ascribed to a person, this may lead to penalties for attractive individuals with a weak trait-job fit. To test this proposition, we combine longitudinal data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) including interviewer ratings of attractiveness with official statistics on occupational gender segregation. Employing a multiverse analysis across 6,912 model specifications, we consistently find positive associations between individuals’ attractiveness and their earnings for both women and men. However, we do not find evidence that attractive individuals face earnings penalties when employed in occupations typically dominated by the opposite gender.

How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown diverse others and the tendency toward homophily and in-group favoritism. We introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure that includes macrostructural conditions for intergroup encounters and microlevel dynamics of intergroup selection and interaction. Using lab-in-the-field experiments with a large representative sample of Italian natives and immigrants from the multiethnic city of Milan, we find that, when pushed to interact with non-coethnics, Italians generally treat them similarly to how they treat coethnics and value signs of social and market integration. However, when given the opportunity to select their interaction partners, Italians favor coethnics over immigrants. Taken together, these results help reconcile classical findings concerning the positive effects of intergroup contact with evidence documenting the persistence of out-group discrimination in selection processes.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in highly publicized attacks against members of minority groups. To date, scholarship has primarily focused on the tendency for such trigger events to generate violent aftershocks. However, we hypothesize that trigger events create a climate of fear that may also significantly impact minorities’ mental health and well-being. To test our conjuncture, we draw upon both national survey data as well as federal hate crime data in combination with a natural experiment involving the Unite the Right rally and vehicle attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. We first show that there was an increase in anti-Black hate crimes in the two weeks following Charlottesville. We also link the Charlottesville attack to an increase in stress about personal hate crime victimization among African-Americans. Interestingly, these results are confined to African-Americans, suggesting that both violent aftershocks and the general climate of fear may be racially bounded.

What is the relationship between classroom ethnic composition and patterns of ethnic friendship segregation amongst native and immigrant adolescents? In a 2016 AJS article, Smith et al. analyzed data on adolescents’ friendship networks from four European countries and found differential effects of classroom composition on natives’ and immigrants’ friendship choices. In this comment, we identify estimation problems in a large number of classroom networks included in Smith et al.’s original study. We demonstrate that immigrant homophily cannot be meaningfully estimated in many networks containing insufficient numbers of immigrant students from the same ethnic group. After accounting for these estimation problems at the network level, our re-analyis provides little evidence that classroom composition has differential effects for native and immigrant homophily.

How do the economic returns to physical attractiveness vary between immigrants and natives? Despite a growing literature on the beauty premium, previous scholarship has not examined whether the size of this premium might vary according to immigrant status, an important axis of social stratification in European societies. We study this question in the German labor market using longitudinal data from a large, randomly drawn nationwide sample that includes interviewer ratings of respondents’ physical attractiveness. Results from a multiverse analysis provide strong evidence of a beauty premium for native German men and women. However, we find mixed results for ethnic minority groups. These results highlight how perceived physical attractiveness is linked to labor market stratification.

We examine how trust and trustworthiness varies with the citizenship status of the alter in three democratic countries with varying sharres of immigrants and levels of economic development: the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland. Trust games were implemented in representative surveys. While we find significant differences in overall levels of trust and trustworthiness across countries, we do not find any significant differences in the degree to which participants trusted or reciprocated trust of interaction partners with the same vs. foreign citizenship status in any of the three countries. Our results suggest that citizenship status is not a salient identity marker to shape trust or trustworthiness in these types of interpersonal interactions.

Each year, several thousand migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa die attempting to reach Europe’s southern shores. Social scientists and policymakers have been puzzling over the question why so many people are prepared to take this extremely high risk of dying. Drawing on panel data from over 10,000 individuals in The Gambia, one of the countries with the highest emigration rates in the world, we show that cultural beliefs in terms of spiritual practices are strongly associated with a decreased perception of one’s own risk of dying on the migration journey. We find that consulting a healer for spiritual protection predicts migration plans and actual migration behavior.

In many Western societies, the current “native” majority will become a numerical minority sometime within the next century. How does prospective demographic change affect existing group boundaries? An influential recent article by Abascal (2020) showed that white Americans under demographic threat reacted with boundary contraction—that is, they were less likely to classify ambiguously white people as “white.” The present study examines the generalizability of these findings beyond the American context. Specifically, we test whether informing Germans about the projected decline of the “native” population without migration background affects the classification of phenotypically ambiguous individuals. Our results show that information about demographic change neither affects the definition of group boundaries nor generates negative feelings toward minority outgroups. These findings point to the relevance of contextual differences in shaping the conditions under which demographic change triggers group threat and boundary shifts..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does immigration-driven ethnic diversity erode support for redistribution? A key claim is that as minorities are viewed as undeserving welfare beneficiaries, diversity reduces support for welfare spending or fuels welfare chauvinism. Yet evidence remains mixed, partly because most studies rely on correlational data. We address this with a large pre-registered field experiment in greater Copenhagen. Supermarket shoppers were invited to sign petitions proposing either a general increase in welfare benefits or the equalization of benefits between immigrants and long-term residents. Petition materials randomly varied the ethnic appearance (Arabic vs. Nordic) of a depicted welfare-receiving family. Across more than 4,000 field observations, we find that the ethnic framing affects the willingness to increase welfare benefits, while attitudes toward equalizing benefits were largely unaffected by ethnicity. We find no consistent contextual moderation by neighborhoods. Our study offers behavioral and causal evidence on how policy framings shape redistributive behavior.

The Islamic headscarf is one of the most visible markers of Muslim identity, often associated with cultural difference and social exclusion in Western societies. Yet little research has examined how veiling might impact broader social perceptions of immigrant minority women, particularly in interaction with markers of high socioeconomic status. In this study, we test how the Muslim headscarf and high socioeconomic status shape natives’ perceptions of trustworthiness of Turkish-origin women. We draw on a vignette experiment embedded in a nationwide survey in Germany, in which we systematically varied the presence of a headscarf (veil vs. no veil) using photo stimuli and signals of a high-status occupation (present vs. absent) presented in a hypothetical lost wallet scenario. We find that high-status cues significantly increase perceived trustworthiness for unveiled Turkish-origin women, but not for veiled women, indicating that the symbolic meanings attached to the headscarf constrain the social returns of socioeconomic attainment. Moreover, these effects are moderated by respondents’ attitudes towards Muslims. Among respondents with positive attitudes, veiled women with high-status occupation are perceived as most trustworthy, whereas among respondents with negative attitudes, higher levels of perceived trustworthiness are attributed to unveiled women with high-status occupation. Together, these findings highlight the unequal returns to status for veiled and unveiled immigrant-origin women in Germany and underscore how symbolic group boundaries and respondent attitudes shape trust judgments.

Muslims in European societies are often perceived as more religious than their Christian counterparts. Such perceptions contribute to Islamophobia rooted in cultural conflict between Muslim traditions and liberal, secular values. Yet religiosity may also function as a beneficial signal in social exchange, communicating moral commitment and prosocial intentions. Drawing on signaling theory, this study examines whether visible expressions of Muslim religiosity foster trust in interpersonal interactions. We conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with commuters at a German train station involving an incentivized trust game and real monetary stakes. The trustee’s identity was experimentally varied along two dimensions: (i) migration background and (ii) putative religiosity signaled through Islamic attire. Results show that Islamic religious signals increase trust toward individuals with a migration background, effectively closing the trust gap between trustees with and without migration background. These findings reveal how religiosity can regulate trust in intergroup exchanges, illuminating its dual role as both a boundary marker and a bridge for cooperation in diverse societies.