• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

briq Newsroom

  • Timeline
  • Archive
  • In the Media
  • Press Lounge

discrimination

Michela Carlana on stereotypes and biased behavior

June 11, 2019

In her first lecture as part of the briq short lecture series, Michela Carlana (Harvard Kennedy School) presented her work on the effect of teacher stereotypes on student outcomes. She focused in particular on gender stereotypes providing evidence from the Italian context. Her work shows that teachers’ gender stereotypes have a negative effect on girls’ performance and self-confidence in own math abilities. Furthermore, stereotypes induce girls to underperform in math and self-select into less demanding high schools, following the track recommendation of their teachers.

Which kind of public policies could be implemented to mitigate the negative effect of exposure to stereotypes? In the second lecture, Michela addressed this issue by analyzing two types of policies. First, she discussed potential debiasing intervention with teachers and parents, and she provided evidence from a recent working paper on the effect of revealing own stereotypes against immigrants to teachers. The study shows that increasing awareness of teachers on own stereotypes reduces bias in grading against immigrants.

Second, she analyzed interventions with students to mitigate constraints induced by stereotypes: for example, the project “Girls Code It Better” is aimed at decreasing the vulnerability of girls to the exposure of the belief that “women are inherently less fit for math and tech fields than men”. In the context of bias against immigrants, she provides evidence of the positive impact of a large-scale randomized control trial targeted at high-achieving students and aimed at tackling their educational segregation in vocational schools.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: biased behavior, discrimination, gender, immigrants, stereotypes

Michal Bauer on nasty behavior in groups

August 24, 2018

Economic theories often focus on the decisions of individuals, despite the fact that many important commercial, political and social decisions are made by groups of people. How do individuals and groups differ in their decision-making processes and what are the wider consequences of this group interaction?

Michal Bauer (CERGE-EI) tackles this issue through his research in the fields of development microeconomics, experimental economics and behavioral economics. His recent work has focused on the causes and consequences of group conflict, discrimination and the formation of preferences. In July he presented two lectures at briq in which he discussed measuring attention in the field to better understand discrimination and poverty, and the sources of “nasty behavior” in groups.

The presentation covered a recent field experiment conducted in Uganda and Slovakia in order to test selfish and anti-social behavior of individuals and groups. Consistent with previous research, it was found that groups are much less likely to display cooperative behavior than individuals. The study also revealed that groups are more likely to also act anti-socially, by punishing outsiders even when it is costly to themselves. The group context also made people much more aggressively competitive.

The greater nastiness of groups arises almost exclusively due to the psychological effect of being a part of a group on individual preferences, rather than due to deliberation and joint decision-making among group members. Strikingly similar patterns on both continents suggest that the elevation of the dark side of human social motivations is a deeply rooted behavioral response when individuals are banded in a group. The findings have implications for economic theory and can help explain the prevalence of self-destructive group conflicts.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: attention, behavior, conflict, decision-making, discrimination, groups, individuals, preferences, selfishness

  • Imprint
  • Privacy Policy
  • Status
© Deutsche Post STIFTUNG