The Sociology of Misperceived Discrimination

Abstract:

How accurate do minority and majority members perceive the extent of ethnic discrimination? Theoretical and empirical scholarship on this question is rare and arguably underdeveloped. The challenge lies in comparing individuals’ perceptions and expectations of discrimination against the actual extent of discrimination as estimated through a valid scientific method. So far, we lack theoretical reasoning and a methodology to study misperceived discrimination. The current study proposes several experimental methodologies to measure misperceptions of ethnic discrimination. The first method is based on a survey experiment that measures misperceptions about the extent of discrimination in society by eliciting citizens’ beliefs about the results of field experiments testing for discrimination. The second method is based on behavioral games, such as the trust game. Prior research has extensively used behavioral games to measure name-based ethnic discrimination. We extent this line of research by exploiting the hitherto overlooked possibility to also survey perceived discrimination in terms of whether participants expect to be discriminated by their game partners. Importantly, this allows us to measure expected and actual discrimination on the same scale and to thus go beyond estimating an association and in fact present a first measure of individual’s over- and under-perceptions of ethnic discrimination they face personally. To measure perceived rather than expected discrimination more directly, the third method is based on a follow-up experiment that mimics the every-day life situation in which minorities need to decide whether they frame an anecdotal event of disadvantage as an experience of intentional discrimination. To do so, we inform participants about their average payoffs from the trust games and randomly treat them with a favorable, unfavorable, or equal comparison to the payoffs of native-named participants. We then study whether participants correctly perceive these comparisons as reflecting intentional discrimination or rather as an instance of bad luck.