"(Not) Welcome to Digital Germany"?

People today spend a significant amount of their time online, engaging in social interactions and navigating various mechanisms of human connection. As such, it is assumed that online users exhibit similar behavioural tendencies as they do in offline interactions when it comes to marginalising or denigrating others. This project investigated whether situational circumstances can explain differences between online and offline environments and how these mechanisms contribute to everyday discrimination on the internet. Funded by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSJ) as part of the Research Network on Discrimination and Racism (FoDiRa), the project aimed to develop a research strategy to explain the situational causes of cyber-discrimination.

Specifically, the project built on key mechanisms from situational action theory (SAT) to explore how situational factors such as perceived threats or fairness norms shape discriminatory behaviour in digital spaces. It also examined the role of ingroup and outgroup categorisations in driving online discrimination. The project was based on the assumption that discrimination occurs not only between ethnic majorities and minorities but also among minority groups. By analysing these mechanisms, the project aimed to explain how digital environments both reflect and diverge from offline spaces in terms of discriminatory behaviour.

Throughout the project, the research team conducted a series of survey experiments, sampling online users from Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Before the main study, the team developed and pretested realistic yet generalisable scenarios and created a survey instrument to capture harmless but discriminatory behaviour. This instrument was implemented in both repeated and one-time surveys, reaching over 1,300 participants. In December 2022 and July 2023, the responses were collected through the advertising tools by Meta and Reddit, a widely accepted method within the research community.

The results of the pretest were presented at several workshops and summarised in a paper for the in-house publication series ‘MZES Fokus’ under the title “Wer wird auf sozialen Medien diskriminiert und aus welchen Gründen? Diskriminierung auf Facebook, Instagram und Reddit”.

One of the key methodological findings is that using the 2nd person perspective in factorial surveys is generally better suited to reduce social desirability bias and unintended priming than using the 3rd person perspective. This is because the 2nd person perspective creates a more immersive experience for respondents, thus encouraging more truthful and less biased answers. However, for sensitive topics, the 3rd person perspective may be preferable, as it helps reduce unintended priming effects and potentially minimises social desirability bias.