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We analysed determinants of willingness to help using a factorial survey approach (n=405 individuals, n=5937 vignettes). We tested the effect of situational characteristics and how characteristics of the bystander and the person in need influence willingness to help in hypothetical situations within the framework of a cost-reward model. We found that the situation itself has the strongest effect: willingness to help was strongest when the net gain of helping was positive, whereas it was weaker in situations when the cost of helping and cost of not receiving help were equal. These results provide support for the cost-reward model of helping and illustrate that the factorial survey approach could supplement or in some cases replace more widely used experimental methods (laboratory or field experiments).

This multimethod project investigates discrimination against members of two populous minority groups in the European Union: the Roma (numbering 6 million) and the disabled (numbering 100 million) on a leading Hungarian carpooling platform. In a field experiment, 1,005 ride requests were sent to drivers, with passenger group membership (control, disabled, Roma) manipulated between participants. Widespread discrimination against both groups was apparent in significantly lower approval rates for disabled (56%) and Roma passengers (52%) relative to control (70%). Mechanisms driving anti-disabled and anti-Roma discrimination were probed using an experimental manipulation, natural language processing analysis of driver–passenger interactions, and an online survey (N = 398). Individuating information in the form of reviews did not mitigate unequal treatment, thus providing evidence against statistical (stereotype-based) discrimination. Militating against taste-based (attitudinal) discrimination, respondents reported negative attitudes toward Roma passengers but positive attitudes toward disabled passengers. Moreover, despite equivalent approval rates, disabled passengers were more likely to receive a response from drivers and received more polite responses than Roma passengers did. Overall, the observed patterns are most readily explained by intergroup emotions: Contempt toward Roma passengers likely engenders both passive and active harm, whereas pity toward disabled passengers likely engenders passive harm and active facilitation.

To what extent can civil rights NGOs protect ethnic minorities against unequal treatment? We study this question by combining an audit experiment of 1260 local governments in Hungary with an intervention conducted in collaboration with a major Hungarian civil rights NGO. In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 percent-points less likely to receive responses to information requests from local governments, and the responses they received were of substantially lower quality. The intervention that reminded a random subset of local governments of their legal responsibility of equal treatment led to a short-term reduction in their discriminatory behavior, but the effects of the intervention dissipated within a month. These findings suggest that civil rights NGOs might face substantive difficulties in trying to reduce discrimination through simple information campaigns.

2020 elején a magyarországi helyi önkormányzati hivatalok körében kontrollált terepkísérletet végeztünk annak céljából, hogy feltárjuk az online ügyintézés során esetlegesen előforduló hivatali diszkrimináció nyílt és burkolt formáit. Összesen 1270 e-mailben egy hétköznapi ügyintézéssel kapcsolatban fogalmaztunk meg egyszerű kérdéseket magas és alacsony státuszú roma és nem roma ügyfelek „bőrébe bújva”. A nemzetközi eredményekkel összhangban a válaszok arányában nem, de a válaszok tartalmi jellemzőiben jelentősebb eltéréseket találtunk az elsődleges kísérleti változó, az etnicitás mentén. A másodlagos kísérleti változóként bevezetett társadalmi státusz mutató hatása ugyanakkor mind a válaszok arányában, mind a többi tartalmi indikátor mentén statisztikailag igazolódott. A válasz-e-mailek gépi tanulásra épülő elemzése is alátámasztotta, hogy a közhivatalnokok különbséget tesznek ügyfeleik vélt státusza szerint, míg a vélt etnicitás vonatkozásában jóval kisebb fokú ez a különbségtétel. Összehasonlítva az etnicitás és a státusz hatását, fontos hangsúlyozni, hogy az etnicitás mentén a válaszok nyelvi megformálását tekintve csak árnyalatnyi különbség látszott; ugyanakkor a státusz szerinti különbségtétel a figyelmen kívül hagyásban is érvényesült, és nyelvileg is explicitebb módon jelent meg, ezért ennek hatása világosan detektálható volt a gépi szövegelemzés segítségével is. Összhangban Bartoš és szerzőtársai (2016) által a bérlakáspiacon megjelenő figyelemdiszkriminációként leírt jelenséggel, az önkormányzati ügyintézés során is azonosítottuk tehát az alacsony státuszú kísérleti személyek kérdéseinek gyengébb minőségű megválaszolását.

This note explores discrimination against ethnic minorities in the new platform economy. Using experiments fielded in collaboration with a Hungarian car-sharing platform we demonstrate that contrary to the conventional wisdom, Roma users are discriminated even when positive reviews are available. Through a collaborative effort with the platform spanning multiple years we designed an intervention whose purpose was to reduce anti-Roma discrimination, and tested it via a survey experiment. We show that forced exposure to our video clip led to a large reduction in discrimination against Roma passengers as mea- sured by survey-takers’ choices made between fictional passengers. While we attempted to pilot our intervention in the field, we were unable to expose real users to our video clip in ways that were compatible with our partner organization’s interests. Taken together our findings showcase both the opportunities and the challenges that are involved in fighting discrimination in cooperation with market players.

The specialty of our paper, based on the Hungarian survey of ISSP 2017 is that (1) we only focus on a single (the planning) phase of the migration process, (2) we use the concept of network capital...

This chapter explains the rationale behind the book. It provides basic definitions of the concept of the sharing economy as well as the primary meanings related to the subject of the analysis undertaken in the subsequent chapters. This Introduction also includes a description of the main benefits of the analysis of the sharing economy from a European perspective. It highlights that the idea of the book emerged from the collaboration of most co-authors in the COST Action CA16121 ‘From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy.’ Finally, the outline of the book is presented, providing a description of the content of each chapter within this academic collection.

In our study we assess the responsiveness of Hungarian local governments to requests for information by Roma and non-Roma clients, relying on a nationwide correspondence study. Our paper has both methodological and substantive relevance. The methodological novelty is that we treat discrimination as a classification problem and study to what extent emails written to Roma and non-Roma clients can be distinguished, which in turn serves as a metric of discrimination in general. We show that it is possible to detect discrimination in textual data in an automated way without human coding, and that machine learning (ML) may detect features of discrimination that human coders may not recognize. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first attempt to assess discrimination using ML techniques. From a substantive point of view, our study focuses on linguistic features the algorithm detects behind the discrimination. Our models worked significantly better compared to random classification (the accuracy of the best of our models was 61%), confirming the differential treatment of Roma clients. The most important predictors showed that the answers sent to ostensibly Roma clients are not only shorter, but their tone is less polite and more reserved, supporting the idea of attention discrimination, in line with the results of Bartos et al. (2016). A higher level of attention discrimination is detectable against male senders, and in smaller settlements. Also, our results can be interpreted as digital discrimination in the sense in which Edelman and Luca (2014) use this term.

The chapter is the final one in the volume of collected papers aiming to discuss the sharing economy in Europe. The idea of the book emerged within the research network created by the COST Action CA16121 ‘From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy.’ The authors of the chapter sum up theoretical and empirical materials as well as country-specific cases provided in the book. The article critically assesses the current status of the sharing economy in European countries by highlighting major controversial issues related to deregulation, market disruption, or social inequality. The authors conclude that, considering the comprehensive and up-to-date materials collected and analysed in the book, it may become an outstanding source of knowledge and a practical tool in the process of expansion of the sharing economy in Europe and beyond.

The chapter explores a broad dimensionality of experiences, learnings, challenges, and potential pathways of the sharing economy in food supply chains. Through technology-enabled business applications, the mobilisation of underutilised assets has been successfully facilitated in the foodservice industry. Community-based models have been relying on the mutual risk-sharing of producers and consumers. Service models and the uberisation of food, when contract workers use their personal vehicles to deliver food to customers, has gained more acknowledgement during the COVID-19 times. Based on our qualitative study, various peer-to-peer production and collaborative consumption initiatives are presented in this chapter to assess how the idea of sharing economy entered the food sector. Our arguments are substantiated with varied case examples at multiple value chain points (e.g., production, processing, transport, and consumption).

Absztrakt: A vizsgalatsorozatot egy budapesti kozepiskolaban 2016 es 2019 kozott vegeztuk, kvantitativ es kvalitativ modszerekre tamaszkodva. Innovativ kutatasunkban a Haver Alapitvany foglalkozass...

Our paper presents the results of a study which was conducted between 2016 and 2019 in a high school in Budapest. The research attempted to measure the impact of the Haver Foundation’s activities on high-school students. The Foundation implements activities about Jewish identity, thus we intended to see whether the different activities of the Foundation changed the attitudes of high-school students, and whether they affected the formers’ level of knowledge and the associations they make with Jews. In line with the sensitivity and complexity of the research topic, and in order to create the broadest analytical framework, we followed several classes in a longitudinal setting by triangulating our methods. Results confirm the importance of these activities, especially with regard to the increase in the level of knowledge about Jews and Judaism. They also indicate that there is a need for such informal settings in high-school education. However, more extensive research needs to be carried out to obtain more accurate results about the reduction of prejudices.

Findings from our pilot research project which focused on providing car sharing services to young people with different ethnic/racial background showed discrimination against certain ethnic groups. The research was based on a controlled field experimental design to examine the chances of rides being offered to racially different testers. The experimental variables were both race and gender. Creating altogether 8 profiles enabled us to test the interaction between these two experimental stimulus. The small-scale research (total N=160) was implemented in Hungary, in summer 2017 by interns of TARKI, Hungarian Social Research Centre. The forthcoming article shows evidence of ethnic/racial disproportionality in offering ride to the different testers by multi-ethnic drivers. High effect size was detected in case of Arabic male tester (d=.87, p=.009) and medium effect in case of the Chinese male tester (d=.62, p=.059). In case of the Russian male profile and female testers of any nationality we did not detect evidence of racial or ethnic discrimination compared to our Dutch benchmark profile, however it has to be noted, that the numbers of observations were very low (N=20 for each profile) in our field experiment. Although the pattern is not clear, interaction effect was shown between gender and nationality; as a consequence of this interaction, the Arabic male tester had far lesser chance of being offered a ride compared to any other combination of gender and nationality.

This chapter focuses on how public opinion has been formed in Hungary in recent years—partly as a consequence of the extremely xenophobic political discourse. The analysis is based on comprehensive empirical research carried out in 2015–2017—combining quantitative and qualitative research techniques.As a theoretical framework, I rely on the Intergroup Threat Theory, originally developed by Stephan and Stephan (Cognition and affect in stereotyping: parallel interactive networks. In Mackie DM, Hamilton DL (eds) Affect, cognition, and stereotyping: interactive processes in group perception. Academic, Orlando, pp 111–136, 1993), which distinguishes the different aspects of threat—connected to asylum-seekers and migrants—perceived by the receiving society. The qualitative results underscore the quantitative results, as both realistic and symbolic threats by Muslim immigrants are perceived to be high in contemporary Hungary, and letting in a great amount of people with unknown identities is seen as posing a serious risk to the receiving society. Most of the arguments given by the interviewees echoed the concepts of the government, in terms of terrorism, contagious diseases, as well as immigrants imposing a huge burden on the welfare state.The analysis also shows that the results have to be interpreted in the light of Hungary’s particular political and social context, namely the following three aspects: (i) a politics characterized by extreme anti-immigration rhetoric since 2015, (ii) integration policies that have been non-existent since the state completely withdrew integration provision in the summer of 2016, and (iii) in terms of the volume of migration, a sharply decreasing number of asylum seekers entering the country since the legal and physical closure of the borders in October 2015.

Over the past 20 years the use of the at-risk-of-poverty threshold has become increasingly widespread. However, as is well known, the indicator builds on a number of assumptions and simplifications that have given rise to several criticisms. In this paper we illustrate how reference budgets can help to ‘contextualise’ the weaknesses of the at-risk-of-poverty threshold by generating more insight into the kind of living standard that can be afforded with an income at the level of the threshold in different countries. This provides essential background information for those using the indicator. More in particular, we make use of the first effort to construct cross-country comparable reference budgets in Europe to show what the strong cross-national differences in living standards imply in practice for the adequacy of incomes at the level of the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. The budgets show that in the poorest EU Member States, even adequate food and housing are barely affordable at the level of the threshold, whereas a decent living standard is much more in reach for those living on the threshold in the richer EU Member States. The reference budgets also suggest that the poverty risk of some groups (for instance children) is underestimated relative to that of other age groups, while the poverty risk of homeowners is probably relatively overestimated.