Keynote Speech | Merlin Schaeffer “Misperceived Discrimination: Opening Up a New Field of Research”

How accurately do minority and majority members perceive the extent of ethnic discrimination? Theoretical and empirical scholarship on this question remains sparse and underdeveloped. The challenge lies in comparing individuals’ perceptions and expectations of discrimination against the actual extent of discrimination as estimated through valid scientific methods. Currently, we lack the theoretical reasoning and methodology required to study misperceptions of discrimination. The current study proposes several experimental methodologies to address this gap. The first method uses a survey experiment to measure misperceptions by eliciting citizens’ beliefs about the results of known field experiments. The second method uses behavioral games, such as the trust game. While prior research has used these games to measure name-based discrimination, we extend this line of research by surveying whether participants expect to be discriminated against by their partners. Crucially, this allows us to measure expected and actual discrimination on the same scale, providing a first measure of individual over- and under-perception. To measure perceived rather than expected discrimination more directly, the third method uses a follow-up experiment that mimics everyday situations in which minorities must decide whether to frame a disadvantageous event as intentional discrimination. By informing participants of their payoffs and providing comparisons to native-named participants, we study whether they correctly perceive these outcomes as intentional discrimination or attribute them to bad luck.