Ethnic Hostility among Ethnic Majority and Minority Groups

As argued by ECT, individuals who hold similar social positions as the majority of outgroup
members, who are consequently more directly in competition with members of outgroups for scarce
resources, will experience more ethnic group threat and hence express more ethnic social distance
and identify stronger to their ethnic ingroup. Moreover, individuals with fewer resources are also
presumably more susceptible to perceive ethnic outgroups as a threat. In the Netherlands, the
lowest educated – also among ethnic minority groups – face higher unemployment levels and have
the lowest levels of resources. At the same time, higher educated ethnic minorities are more likely
to be (or to have been) in circumstances with relatively more natives, either due to their place of
residence (i.e. whiter neighbourhoods) or for example due to the ethnic composition of their work
place. Note that in contrast, lower educated natives and not the higher educated natives are more
likely to be in circumstances with relatively more members of ethnic outgroups.
Given the consistent fi nding from previous research that education is negatively related
to ethnic hostility and that lower educated have less resources than higher educated, we expect
that: Educational attainment will be negatively related to opposition to ethnically mixed relationships
for all ethnic groups in the Netherlands, and that educational attainment will also be negatively
related to identifi cation with the country of origin among minority groups (Hypothesis 1).
However, due to the relatively common prevalence of perceptions of threat among higher
educated minorities compared to higher educated natives, we expect that: The negative effect of
education on opposition to ethnically mixed relationships will be smaller for ethnic minority groups
than for native Dutch (Hypothesis 2).
Although perceptions of threat among higher educated minorities are more common
than among higher educated natives, we still expect that perceptions of group threat are less
common among higher educated minorities than among lower educated minorities; there is a
similar gradient in perceptions of threat across educational categories across ethnic minority
groups and the native population but the gradient is less steep among ethnic minority groups.
Thus: Perceptions of threat should interpret the (negative) effect of education on opposition to
ethnically mixed relationships and identifi cation with the country of origin among minority groups,
according to ECT (Hypothesis 3).
7.2.2 Homogenization of educational categories
Education affects ethnic hostility not only because perceived threat is related to educational
levels. Education asserts its negative infl uence on ethnic hostility – at least among dominant
or native ethnic groups – also because the cognitive skills developed at school protect the
formation of ill informed, derogative stereotypes. Due to the increased educational opportunities
for all social classes following educational expansion in western societies (Breen & Jonsson,
2005), the people ending up in the lowest categories of the educational system became a more
homogenous group with fewer educational skills (cf. Gesthuizen, De Graaf, & Kraaykamp, 2005;
Gesthuizen & Kraaykamp, 2002). The less severe selection moments during the educational
career introduced more heterogeneity among higher educated but the homogenization of the
lowest categories is likely to have a stronger impact than the lost exclusivity of the highest
educational categories, since individuals with a completed higher education still remain a fairly
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