The figure shows the rate at which native Dutch citizens opt for an equal split of 160 Euro (indicated as sharing) versus keeping 85 Euro for oneself and giving 20 Euro to a partner. Included are the overall rate of sharing, the rate of sharing of citizens who are rather intolerant to ethnic diversity, and that of citizens who are tolerant to ethnic diversity.
Tastes in discrimination research Evidence suggests that people from ethnic minority backgrounds face discrimination in everyday life, for example in the employment market, or in the ability to rent a car. While sometimes discrimination occurs because a decision-maker lacks sufficient information, in other situations it may be taste-based, an issue at the heart of Professor Sigrid Suetens’ research. Many
European countries are characterised by high levels of ethnic diversity, with people from all over the world living and working together, particularly in major cities. However, people from ethnic minority backgrounds may still face discrimination in the employment market, according to Sigrid Suetens, Professor of Economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “People from an ethnic minority background often have a hard time in finding a job. Studies have shown that job applicants with a minority background are less frequently invited for a job interview than applicants from the majority, even if their qualifications are the same,” she says. Discrimination is also still evident in other areas of everyday life, despite efforts to tackle it. “For example, in a study on ebay sports cards held by a white-skinned hand were sold for lower prices than the same cards held by a black-skinned hand,” explains Professor Suetens. “It’s also been shown that it’s much harder for people from minority backgrounds to rent a house.” 62
Diverse-Expecon project As the Principal Investigator of the DiverseExpecon project, Professor Suetens aims to investigate the role of so-called tastes in discrimination. To study discrimination, a distinction is often drawn between tastebased discrimination (TBD) and statistical discrimination, the latter of which is closely related to the idea of stereotyping. “Discrimination can be thought of in a way as a very rational behaviour, in the sense that if you do not have a lot of information about a specific group in society, then as an employer you might use the general information available to make a decision,” outlines Professor Suetens. TBD is different to statistical discrimination; in a way it has deeper roots. “The easiest way to understand TBD is to consider an example where an employer wants to hire someone, knows perfectly that the future productivity of all applicants will be the same, and still discriminates on the basis of ethnicity,” explains Professor Suetens. The aim in the project is to study whether tastes are important to understand discrimination,
and if so how they are important, which could in future help inform policy development. One part of the work involved giving people the opportunity to make choices that have reallife financial consequences, then assessing their responses. “We ran an experiment in the Netherlands on a large sample of Dutch people. We confronted them with a case where there wasn’t really any statistical uncertainty involved for the decision-maker,” says Professor Suetens. This allowed researchers to investigate whether respondents treated people from an ethnic minority background any differently. “In this experiment, people had to decide who got what in terms of money,” continues Professor Suetens. “The trade-off was basically a choice between two parties getting an equal amount, which would still be reasonably high, or the decision-maker getting a higher amount.” Researchers varied the first name of the other person involved in this experiment, aiming to uncover any differences in how people from ethnic minority backgrounds are treated. In one treatment, all the first names were related to
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