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Do pessimistic expectations about discrimination make minorities withdraw their effort? Causal evidence
Korlyakova, Darya
There is a long-standing concern that expected discrimination discourages minorities from exercising effort to succeed. Effort withdrawal could contribute to confirming negative stereotypes about minorities’ productivity and enduring disparities. This paper extends the findings of correlational research by exogenously manipulating individuals’ beliefs about discrimination against their group and exploring a causal link between perceived discrimination and individuals’ labor market behavior. For this purpose, we conduct an online experiment in the US with a diverse sample of 2,000 African Americans. We randomly assign individuals to two groups and inform one group about the frequency of discrimination against African Americans in a previous survey. To study the information effects on effort, we subsequently measure participants’ results on a math task. We document that most individuals initially overestimate discrimination against African Americans. The overestimation decreases strongly and significantly as a result of information provision. At the same time, treated individuals, males in particular, attempt and solve correctly fewer math problems compared to untreated individuals. Hence, our findings do not support the common concern that minorities’ inflated expectations about discrimination induce them to underperform.
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Shifting punishment on minorities: experimental evidence of scapegoating
Bauer, Michal ; Cahlíková, J. ; Chytilová, Julie ; Roland, G. ; Želinský, T.
This paper provides experimental evidence showing that members of a majority group systematically shift punishment on innocent members of an ethnic minority. We develop a new incentivized task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game, to measure how injustice affecting a member of one’s own group shapes punishment of an unrelated bystander (“a scapegoat”). We manipulate the ethnic identity of the scapegoats and study interactions between the majority group and the Roma minority in Slovakia. We find that when no harm is done, there is no evidence of discrimination against the ethnic minority. In contrast, when a member of one’s own group is harmed, the punishment ”passed” on innocent individuals more than doubles when they are from the minority, as compared to when they are from the dominant group. These results illuminate how individualized tensions can be transformed into a group conflict, dragging minorities into conflicts in a way that is completely unrelated to their behavior.
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Learning about ethnic discrimination from different information sources
Korlyakova, Darya
We experimentally study whether public beliefs about ethnic discrimination, an emotionally loaded issue, are shifted more by information from experts or from ordinary people. We also examine whether people are inclined to choose the most influential sources. For this purpose, we combine, in a novel design, the random provision of information from different sources with endogenous information acquisition from the same sources. We find that individuals update their beliefs most in response to information from experts, namely researchers studying ethnic minorities and human resource managers. Exogenous adjustments in beliefs do not induce changes in attitudes to ethnic minorities. Consistent with the strength of belief updating, more individuals choose information from experts over information from ordinary people. This result suggests that, in the aggregate, people behave rationally as they favor a source that is perceived to be relatively accurate. The findings have implications for information dissemination policies.
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