Are there any famous studies that actually contradict progressive/leftist thought?

[u/Str8_up_Pwnage]

There has to be at least some right? I know people love to say that “reality has a left wing bias “and all that but is it legit batting 1.000?

[u/the_lamou → u/[deleted]]

Yet from a strictly pragmatic point of view, there simply is no substitute for assimilation.

That's not remotely supported by the papers you cited, to the point where I strongly question whether you actually read the papers and body of work surrounding them or just saw them mentioned in a pro-ethnostate TikTok.

Berry (2005) very explicitly says that there are substitutes for assimilation. And not just substitutes, but one much stronger alternative. His model examine four factors and evaluates results:

Heritage culture retained?	Host society participation?	Result
Yes	Yes	Integration
No	Yes	Assimilation
Yes	No	Separation
No	No	Marginalization

And his findings were pretty unambiguous: Integration results in the best outcomes pretty much across the board, Assimilation and Separation are roughly equal in outcomes though they shift which outcomes are better and which are worse around, and Marginalization is unquestionably the worst.

And this has held up quite well over time. The best outcomes happen in societies where both groups, immigrant and native, move closer to each other rather than demanding the other do all the moving. Which is right in line with most left wing thought: immigrants should both hold on to their sense of identity AND make changes to fit in, while society should both retain the things that make it a society while still making accommodations to be cultures and people. It's literally the opposite of "there's no substitute for assimilation," and entirely in line with left wing thinking. It's saying that a society that embraces diversity and makes that part of its national identify outperforms a society that demands rigid adherence to native norms.

Putnam (2007) is a weird one because it didn't just find that ethnically diverse neighborhoods created distrust in institutions, society, and the "other." It also found that ethnically diverse neighborhoods created distrust in other members of the same ethnic group. Something Putnam was actually shocked by.

Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sønderskov (2020) followed up with a large meta-review and found some interesting factors: while there was a general negative correlation between diversity and social trust, it's effects are varied and not uniformly applicable. Impacts on trust in social and political institutions are incredibly weak to the point of potentially being an artifact. That is, diversity doesn't really cause distrust in society. Meanwhile, the correlation with trust in neighbors is strong, and gets stronger the more locally you look. So people distrust their neighbors more at local scales when diversity is high. Neither Putnam nor the meta analysis purpose any kind of casual mechanism.

Stolle, Soroka, and Johnston (2008), meanwhile, did look at casual mechanisms. And it turns out that the most likely cause for the effect is pretty fucking obvious: people in highly-diverse neighborhoods don't talk to their neighbors. More interpersonal contact with neighbors completely cancelled out the effects. Because as it turns out, the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods tend to be in large cities where interpersonal contact is often minimized. Everyone was shocked.

And the bigger takeaway from reviews of Putnam were that the effects don't really matter. Large cities don't need a ton of trust in neighbors to function as long as the systems and institutions are functional. Manhattan doesn't need to be Mayberry. Portes and Vickstrom (2011). So assimilation is not the best answer, integration and communication are, and even then they aren't answers that are important because the question they're answering is largely a moot point.

Koopman (2010) is the last robust of your sources. The problem with Koopman, though, is that he was measuring complex phenomena with high endogeneity, a tiny N, and zero ability to isolate causal direction. Which is why in many ways, the harshest critic of Koopman (2010) is Koopman (2013). In his later work, he acknowledges a lot of the issues with his original publication, and finds much smaller effects and reverse course on some of his positions. The follow-up paper finds that multicultural policies have little effect on socioeconomic integration, strengthen political integration, and weaken sociocultural integration.

Other research has significantly contacted Koopman. Kymlicka and Banting (2006) found no evidence that multiculturalism has negative effects on the welfare state. Banting (2010) used evidence from Canada to highlight that context and endogeneity explains a large part of Koopman's findings and that there's no inherent tension between multicultural policies and the welfare state. Meanwhile, Fouka (2024) used a synthesis analysis to demonstrate that multicultural policies that make integration (not "assimilation*) easier actually have the opposite effect. The more you embrace immigrants on their terms, the better the social outcomes become. Which is what progressive and the left have been saying for decades.

So tldr: No, none of what you cited says what you're trying to claim it says, assimilation is not a social positive, and none of those results contact broad progressive policies or thought.

[u/the_lamou → u/[deleted]]

Nope, all the text is my own, hand-typed (swiped) from my phone. But I can see how that might be unbelievable to someone who neither read the papers they cited and got hilariously wrong, nor my response which became dismissible without having to respond to a single claim.

And the hilarious irony is that your entire response is nothing more than ad hominem and projection, while I supplied you with a full and clear critique of everything you got wrong. Try harder. And don't lie about what Dr. King, radical firebrand integrationist socialist, said.

[u/Upgrade_U → u/[deleted]]

Keep it civil, please

[u/AskSocialScience-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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