Lessons in embracing diversity
Issue 106: We describe a study we conducted with International House, including take-home lessons about how they embrace diversity and avoid intolerance
As the U.S. population becomes increasingly racially and ethnically diverse and the world increasingly interconnected, it is critical to understand how to foster healthy interactions between people from different backgrounds. Understanding how to embrace diversity while avoiding conflict, intolerance, and xenophobia, is one of the fundamental challenges of our time.
Last year, we met with representatives from International House (also known as I-House) who may have uncovered some of the secret ingredients to help people embrace diversity. I-House is a non-profit residence in New York City that houses 700 graduate students and young professionals from nearly 100 countries around the world. We conducted a large study of their alumni and observed several themes that will be useful to teams, organizations, and communities that want to embrace genuine diversity.
I-House alumni have long reported that living amidst such a diverse group of people is a life-changing experience that they carry into their communities, practices, and professions throughout their lives. However, despite a wealth of anecdotes, the organization had never run a formal study on their alumni to see if the influence of living at I-House is genuinely that profound–and to understand why. So I-House reached out to us to collect data from their alumni to see if we could figure out what has worked.
During their stay at I-House, residents live together, break bread, attend guest lectures, and engage in other enriching events. The residence is built on the philosophy that living in a genuinely diverse community can instill a lifelong dedication to cross-cultural understanding. I-House uses an intentional admissions process to curate an eclectic, interdisciplinary cohort of diverse individuals who come together at a key stage in life for a crash course in social and cultural intelligence. Founded in 1924, I-House pre-dates the United Nations by over two decades, but it operates under similar principles.
In collaboration with I-House, we conducted a study to investigate how living in an international and racially diverse environment impacts the psychology of their alumni. We sent out a survey and obtained data from over 1,600 I-House alums with an average age of 52 who lived there between 1952 and 2023 for an average of one and a half years. The data revealed several fascinating things. With their permission, we are able to share the results with you, along with a few take-home lessons for people trying to create more vibrant environments.
Overall, we found evidence suggesting that living at I-House is associated with greater social and cultural intelligence. Specifically, alumni were more open-minded and tolerant than the average population. For instance, the alumni of I-House scored much higher on measures of pro-social behavior than other populations, including their rates of helping strangers (79%), donating money to charity (63%), and volunteering (52%).
In addition, I-House alumni scored higher than global benchmarks on most measures of positive functioning we considered, including openness to experience, global citizenship, intellectual humility, empathy, and conscientiousness. We used well validated measures and the results were consistent and quite striking. As you can see in the figure below, we noticed clear differences such that I-House alumni routinely outscored benchmark samples.
This pattern of data was particularly true of those alumni who identified closely with I-House and the organization’s core values of respect, empathy, and moral courage. I-House alumni also displayed lower affective polarization and lower neuroticism compared to the typical US citizen in other samples. This suggests that people who absorbed the norms and values of I-House were the most committed to these values–even many years after they had left.
Finally, qualitative data from our study’s open-ended questions showed that I-House creates a nurturing environment where members feel valued, supported, and inspired. With a few exceptions, the reports from alumni were overwhelmingly positive. People mostly raved about the experience of meeting people truly different from themselves and coming to a deeper understanding of other cultures and perspectives.
Overall, we concluded that I-House was a place with extremely high levels of cross-cultural understanding and awareness for those who have been in residence. This suggests that institutions and organizations can greatly benefit from cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity and fostering positive interactions among the members of these different groups.
The only major caveat from our study is that we could not conduct a randomized control trial or longitudinal study. This is the only way to know for sure if the experience at I-House was the key ingredient for change (for example, it’s possible that I-House has done an unusually good job of selecting open-minded, empathic, and pro-social people as residents).
We would love to conduct such a study in the future. But for now, every data point we collected pointed toward the conclusion that the sorts of experiences people have at I-House have a profoundly positive influence–from the measures we collected to hundreds of testimonials.
The key lessons we took from this study might be useful if you are trying to navigate and embrace diversity in your workplace, team, or community.
People overwhelmingly reported that the simple act of meeting and talking to people from different background to discuss ideas in depth was extremely valuable. In many cases, they said it gave them a deeper understanding of difference and they no longer felt a need to agree about everything.
People who identified the most with I-House and embraced their social norms had the highest scores on more measures of openness, empathy, and pro-sociality. This underscores the importance of constantly building and reinforcing norms that embrace these values within any community.
Finally, many people reported that their experience at I-House was more informative and transformative than their education. For instance, one study participant, who had been a graduate student at an Ivy-league school while living at I-House, noted that they learned more from I-House than from one of the world’s most prestigious universities. And dozens reported that they used the skills they acquired there throughout their careers.
We conducted this study with Drs. Anni Sternisko and Diego Reinero, along with the help of several members of International House (especially Kate Gorman and Sebastian Fries).We are grateful for all their help and insights.
We are often asked if we offer consulting services. Though we decline most requests because they are too small (e.g., only a couple of hours) or outside our expertise, we are certainly willing if the project is substantial and relevant to our interests and experience. If you would like us to conduct research like this in your own organization, please visit our website to learn more about our research and consulting services.
Our consulting services include deep collaborations with clients in which we conduct customized research studies to assist organizations in evaluating initiatives and reaching their goals . Our expert team helps to identify pivotal research questions, design and craft measures, execute data collection, and analyze and present findings and recommendations to leadership.
News and Updates
Jay will be giving a Keynote talk on The Power of Us at the The Montessori Event in Orlando, Florida (and online) on March 7th. If you are in the area and want to learn more about these issues—and how they apply to education—please register for the event to learn more!
Catch up on the last one…
Eric Klinenberg reflects on the year 2020 and why it was an historical turning point in his new book! Read last week’s newsletter for a preview: