Some groups are generally more welcome: families with children (not wanted by only 4% of respondents), the elderly (4%), the poor (6%), and people speaking a different language (7%). As with other categories, there is large variation in these attitudes across countries. Twenty-four percent of Turks do not want speakers of other languages as their neighbor. The poor are not particularly welcome neighbors in places like Moldova, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, Kosovo, and Mongolia (12-19% do not want them). In some countries, even the elderly (17% in Moldova) and families with children (17% in Kosovo) are frowned upon as neighbors. On average, most people indicate 4 to 6 groups they do not want as neighbors, although this number is lower in France and Sweden (2.6 and 2.7, respectively).

Dislike of other groups is not confined to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The World Value Survey (WVS) includes a similarly worded question about unwanted neighbors. In South Africa, 46% of respondents do not want to live next to a homosexual, 14% do not want Indians as neighbors and 9% do not want to live next to a white or a colored person (WVS 5<sup>th</sup> round, 2007). In Finland, 24% do not want Russians as neighbors. In South Korea, none of the groups asked about are widely accepted: immigrants are unwanted by 39%, people of a different race by 36%, people with AIDS by 94%, and homosexuals 87%. In India, between 40% and 50% of the respondents do not want immigrants, speakers of another language, people with a different religion, race or with AIDS as a neighbor—remarkable given the multiethnic and multi-religious composition of Indian society.

Taking a global view, four groups stand out as almost universally untolerated, and often by a large majority: heavy drinkers, drug users, homosexuals, and people with HIV/AIDS. It is not surprising that many people are intolerant of drug users and alcoholics as neighbors (or pedophiles for that matter)— these groups can be associated with risk and noise. The same is not true for homosexuals and people with HIV/AIDS. With the exception of industrialized western countries, these groups are unwanted neighbors by more than a quarter of survey respondents, and in some countries, far more.

# **Discriminatory attitudes are often expressed in behavior**

These findings do not show whether and how those attitudes are expressed in social and economic life. What they point to is that at some point in our lives, we are likely to interact with people who hold negative attitudes toward us because of the social groups to which we belong. The survey results also illustrate that a large number of people may be subject to amplification of negative attitudes and discrimination flowing from holding multiple identities: e.g. simultaneously being an immigrant, speaker of another language and having another race and religion.

Yet negative attitudes measured through the ‘unwelcome neighbors’ survey question are unlikely to remain confined to social contexts. Attitudes to certain groups are likely to be reflections of deeper values that transcend specific situations and contexts (Schwartz, 2009). In the case of frontline service provision, the negative attitudes by providers toward specific client groups often find expression in the manner in which services are provided, even when discriminatory practices transgress the norms and protocols<sup>4</sup> of the providers’ institutions. Teachers in India, for example, have been found to make lower-

> 4 We use the term ‘off-protocol’ in referring to behaviors that lies outside of the given institutions in which individuals are operating at that time. The term is based on work by Helmke and Levistsky (2004) who refer to

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