We surround ourselves with people who are similar to us in status and views. But is that a problem? Sociologist Olaf Groh-Samberg investigates bubbles.
New housing development in Prenzlauer Berg. If all houses are the same, does this also apply to their residents? Photo: Jörg Brüggemann/Ostkreuz
wochentaz: Mr. Groh-Samberg, how homogeneous is your circle of acquaintances?
Groh-Samberg is professor of sociology at the Research Center for Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen and spokesperson for the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (FGZ). He is one of the authors of the first FGZ cohesion report, published under the title “Decoupled Living Worlds?”
Olaf Groh-Samberg: Quite homogeneous.
As a person with a high level of education, you belong to one of the risk groups for living in social bubbles.
Yes, it's a bubble.
In your study you also analyze the risks of disconnecting social groups: do you now see the need to act? According to the motto: Will I take the bus more often to meet other people?
Of course that's something that moves me. I am a sociologist and also an inequality researcher. When I visit a city, I also go to parts of the city that normal tourists might not visit because I have some sociological interest. However, it is not easy to establish personal friendships and meet other social media.
Why are highly educated and Green Party voters often isolated in their social networks?
Social circles of acquaintances and networks are largely mediated by workplaces and educational institutions. The German education system is highly segregated. That is, it presents certain opportunity structures that are socially pre-filtered. Furthermore, there is a tendency among people to have a fundamental inclination to establish contacts with similar people. This is called homophily. There is also a tendency towards a certain demarcation between social groups; We then talk about a differentiation strategy. This can extend to open hostility and plays an important role across political lines in Germany.
“Academics have always kept very secretive, but back then they were small, elite, educated middle-class circles.”
If homophily and distinction are eternal strategies, what is new in social bubbles?
This is the first time that we have collected data in this way on personal social networks in Germany, so we do not have comparative studies from previous times. But if we look at the evolution of recent decades, research on inequality shows that districts are increasingly socially divided. There are high segregation trends in the school, training and university systems…
…and at the same time more and more academics: aren't groups that previously remained separate mixing?
Everything has two faces. Academics have always kept very secretive, but back then they were small, elite, educated middle class circles. Today, academics constitute a significantly large population group. There used to be a stronger middle ground where people were more similar in terms of their educational level and professional status.
Where is decoupling most evident?
We see them with special force in the political sphere. It is certainly not as evident as in the United States, but there is also strong polarization in Germany, between people close to the Greens and people close to the AfD.
How many Greens should an AFD voter know and vice versa so as not to be disconnected?
If “most” of the people you know are green, but “many” are still close to the AfD, or if “many” in your own network are green, but “some” are also AfD supporters, the network is no longer considered homogeneous. So it depends on the relationship between the two groups.
And what about the other parties?
We had to limit ourselves in the survey, so we chose the two parties that we know from other studies to have the greatest ideological distance from each other. In Germany, these are currently the AfD and the Greens.
Beyond Greens/AfD voters and highly educated people: which groups stood out as socially disconnected in the study?
Rural groups are very strong among themselves, as are Muslim faith groups. People of immigrant origin have a very low tendency to remain silent.
Do you have an explanation for this?
Just a guess, since we didn't ask directly about the causes: the Muslim faith is something that contributes more strongly to the formation of networks through religious institutions, while a migratory background is so common that it is not conducive to the formation of networks.
According to a study by the Technical University of Dresden, the perceived polarization is stronger than the real one. That is why some sociologists warn that the discourse about supposed polarization is exacerbating a problem that does not exist in such a drastic way.
Public discourse is always more polarized than the real opinion of the population. But there is polarization at least at the edges, which has become more pronounced in recent years.
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If you use AfD and Green voters as partisan political groups in your study, instead of, for example, the CDU and SPD, are you contributing to this image?
Probably yes. But it also makes a difference whether you read the study or the report about it. Of course, the results with the Greens and the AfD stand out in particular.
What result would you like to see reflected in the report?
I would like to emphasize that German society does not live in completely parallel societies. We have collected many characteristics of the network and the tendency to segregation varies greatly in each case. We see, for example, that the poor who move in homogeneous networks differ significantly in their attitudes and, above all, in their experiences, from the poor who do not move in homogeneous networks. They experience significantly greater devaluation and significantly less cohesion.
Why is that? One might assume that one experiences less devaluation in a homogeneous circle of friends.
Again, I can only speculate on the causes or rely on the current state of research: we know that poverty is strongly segregated in socio-spatial terms and that residents of socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, in particular, are secretive and at the same time feel very strongly stigmatized and devalued, simply because of their domicile.
And for which population groups does it not matter whether they live in a social bubble or not?
For example, among people with a low educational level. This group has a strong tendency towards segregation. But if we look at people with low educational levels who move in homogeneous networks and people with low educational levels who do not move in those bubbles, then they do not differ much in their attitudes and values.
The key thing for you is: is everything clear when it comes to parallel societies?
The problem with warnings and approvals is that they require trend statements. We can not do that. But an important finding is that AfD and Green voters are highly segregated from each other and also reject each other to the maximum.
This is a problem?
It can become a problem when certain social groups lose sight of each other. In certain environments it is no longer understood what the reality of life is like in other environments and what kind of unreasonable demands, for example, certain social transformations mean for others that are not a problem for their own environment.