How classroom composition affects social trust in secondary schools: The role of attribute alignment

This study examines how the alignment of ethnic origin and gender in school classes affects adolescents’ social trust. We argue that adolescents whose co-ethnic classmates tend to be of a different gender than classmates of other ethnic origin are less likely to trust unknown others – compared to students in classes where both boys and girls are well represented within their ethnic ingroup and outgroup. Moreover, previous scholarship suggests this impact of attribute alignment to vary between ethnic majority and minority students, as majority students’ higher levels of social trust may be particularly reduced by the experience of attribute alignment. We evaluate these hypotheses using data from a large-scale school survey among 8th-grade students in Germany. Our analyses show that the alignment of ethnic origin and gender in the school class reduces generalised trust in people as well as context-specific trust in unknown grade mates among majority students, whereas for minority students no significant relationship was found.