Seen Through Others: A Social Network Analysis of Vicarious Discrimination in the Labour Market

Although ethnic discrimination is widespread in many European labour markets (Zschirnt & Ruedin, 2016; Quillian & Lee, 2023), public perceptions about its prevalence vary widely, both across countries and over time, and are shaped by information exposure (Mijs et al., 2024; Schaeffer et al., 2024; Ziller, 2014). An important yet underexamined channel through which experiences of discrimination are shared and information is acquired is social networks. By witnessing or hearing that a network member has been the victim of discrimination (i.e. vicarious discrimination), individuals become aware of the prevalence of discrimination in society, may update their perceptions accordingly, and become more vigilant about the occurrence of discrimination in ambiguous situations (Dhanani & LaPalme, 2019).
In this paper, we examine people’s vicarious discrimination experiences from a social network perspective. We bridge two strands of literature that have developed in isolation. On the one hand, the sociological literature on discrimination perceptions (Diehl et al., 2021; McAvay & Safi, 2025; Van Tubergen, 2025) has largely overlooked vicarious experiences and relied on indirect proxies of information transmission, such as the local presence of ethnic minorities or the incidence of ethnically motivated crimes. By contrast, social psychology research has focused on vicarious discrimination in relation to mental well-being but typically measures such experiences in general terms rather than from a social network perspective (Louie and Upenieks, 2022; Quinn et al., 2023). Our study contributes to both disciplines.
We collected data through the LISS panel, a household probability sample drawn from the Dutch population register. We oversampled respondents with a migration background and recent job seekers (N=1004). Our contribution is also methodological: we collected ego-centered network data by asking respondents to name up to 20 individuals with whom they discuss important work-related matters, and whether each had disclosed any experience of discrimination at work or while searching for jobs. A key strength of our measure is that it enables us to model the network ties through which vicarious discrimination experiences are more likely to be transmitted. We show, first, that migrants are more likely to encounter vicarious discrimination due to network homophily. Second, net of network structure, such experiences are more likely to be shared when ego and alter are demographically similar. Taken together, and likely reinforced by patterns of residential and workplace segregation, these network dynamics imply that ethnic minorities and majorities may develop markedly different perceptions about the prevalence of discrimination in society.