IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/1817.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence from Immigrants in Schools

Author

Listed:
  • Alberto Alesina

    (Department of Economics, Harvard University, IGIER Bocconi, NBER and CEPR)

  • Michela Carlana

    (Harvard Kennedy School and IZA)

  • Eliana La Ferrara

    (Department of Economics, IGIER and LEAP, Bocconi University)

  • Paolo Pinotti

    (Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi University, DONDENA, and Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti)

Abstract

If individuals become aware of their stereotypes, do they change their behavior? We study this question in the context of teachers' bias in grading immigrants and native children in middle schools. Teachers give lower grades to immigrant students compared to natives who have the same performance on standardized, blindly-graded tests. We then relate differences in grading to teachers' stereotypes, elicited through an Implicit Association Test (IAT). We find that math teachers with stronger stereotypes give lower grades to immigrants compared to natives with the same performance. Literature teachers do not differentially grade immigrants based on their own stereotypes. Finally, we share teachers' own IAT score with them, randomizing the timing of disclosure around the date on which they assign term grades. All teachers informed of their stereotypes before term grading increase grades assigned to immigrants. Revealing stereotypes may be a powerful intervention to decrease discrimination, but it may also induce a reaction from individuals who were not acting in a biased way.

Suggested Citation

  • Alberto Alesina & Michela Carlana & Eliana La Ferrara & Paolo Pinotti, 2018. "Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence from Immigrants in Schools," CReAM Discussion Paper Series 1817, Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Department of Economics, University College London.
  • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:1817
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_17_18.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alberto Alesina & Armando Miano & Stefanie Stantcheva, 2023. "Immigration and Redistribution," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 90(1), pages 1-39.
    2. Michela Carlana & Eliana La Ferrara & Paolo Pinotti, 2017. "Goals and Gaps: Educational Careers of Immigrant Children," Working Papers 111, "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.
    3. Jonathan de Quidt & Johannes Haushofer & Christopher Roth, 2018. "Measuring and Bounding Experimenter Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(11), pages 3266-3302, November.
    4. Alberto Alesina & Eliana La Ferrara, 2014. "A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(11), pages 3397-3433, November.
    5. Alesina, Alberto Francesco & La Ferrara, Eliana, 2014. "A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing," Scholarly Articles 30752840, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    6. Lucia Corno & Eliana La Ferrara & Justine Burns, 2022. "Interaction, Stereotypes, and Performance: Evidence from South Africa," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(12), pages 3848-3875, December.
    7. Facchini, Giovanni & Margalit, Yotam & Nakata, Hiroyuki, 2022. "Countering public opposition to immigration: The impact of information campaigns," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    8. Michela Carlana, 2019. "Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers’ Gender Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 134(3), pages 1163-1224.
    9. Altonji, Joseph G. & Blank, Rebecca M., 1999. "Race and gender in the labor market," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 48, pages 3143-3259, Elsevier.
    10. Eric P. Bettinger, 2012. "Paying to Learn: The Effect of Financial Incentives on Elementary School Test Scores," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 94(3), pages 686-698, August.
    11. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pc:p:3143-3259 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Simon Burgess & Ellen Greaves, 2013. "Test Scores, Subjective Assessment, and Stereotyping of Ethnic Minorities," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 31(3), pages 535-576.
    13. Fernando Botelho & Ricardo Madeira, Marcos A. Rangel, 2015. "Racial Discrimination in Grading: Evidence from Brazil," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2015_04, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).
    14. Fernando Botelho & Ricardo A. Madeira & Marcos A. Rangel, 2015. "Racial Discrimination in Grading: Evidence from Brazil," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(4), pages 37-52, October.
    15. Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2004. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(4), pages 991-1013, September.
    16. Will Dobbie & Jacob Goldin & Crystal S. Yang, 2018. "The Effects of Pretrial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(2), pages 201-240, February.
    17. Carlana, Michela, 2018. "Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers’ Gender Bias," Working Paper Series rwp18-034, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    18. Barbieri, Gianna & Rossetti, Claudio & Sestito, Paolo, 2011. "The determinants of teacher mobility: Evidence using Italian teachers’ transfer applications," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(6), pages 1430-1444.
    19. Decio Coviello & Nicola Persico, 2015. "An Economic Analysis of Black-White Disparities in the New York Police Department's Stop-and-Frisk Program," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 44(2), pages 315-360.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Michela Carlana, 2019. "Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers’ Gender Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 134(3), pages 1163-1224.
    2. Victor Lavy & Rigissa Megalokonomou, 2019. "Persistency in Teachers’ Grading Bias and Effects on Longer-Term Outcomes: University Admissions Exams and Choice of Field of Study," NBER Working Papers 26021, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Nicoletti, Cheti & Sevilla, Almudena & Tonei, Valentina, 2022. "Gender Stereotypes in the Family," IZA Discussion Papers 15773, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Thomas van Huizen, 2021. "Teacher bias or measurement error bias? Evidence from track recommendations," Working Papers 2113, Utrecht School of Economics.
    5. Nicole Black & Sonja C. de New, 2020. "Short, Heavy and Underrated? Teacher Assessment Biases by Children's Body Size," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 82(5), pages 961-987, October.
    6. Huong Thu Le & Ha Trong Nguyen, 2018. "The evolution of the gender test score gap through seventh grade: new insights from Australia using unconditional quantile regression and decomposition," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-42, December.
    7. J. Michelle Brock & Ralph De Haas, 2023. "Discriminatory Lending: Evidence from Bankers in the Lab," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 15(2), pages 31-68, April.
    8. Bellés Obrero, Cristina & Lombardi, María, 2019. "Teacher Performance Pay and Student Learning: Evidence from a Nationwide Program in Peru," IZA Discussion Papers 12600, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Barron, Kai & Ditlmann, Ruth & Gehrig, Stefan & Schweighofer-Kodritsch, Sebastian, 2020. "Explicit and implicit belief-based gender discrimination: A hiring experiment," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change SP II 2020-306, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    10. Haaland, Ingar & Roth, Christopher, 2019. "Beliefs About Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 2/2019, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.
    11. Lavy, Victor & Sand, Edith, 2018. "On the origins of gender gaps in human capital: Short- and long-term consequences of teachers' biases," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 263-279.
    12. Ingar K. Haaland & Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "Designing Information Provision Experiments," CESifo Working Paper Series 8406, CESifo.
    13. Nikoloz Kudashvili & Philipp Lergetporer, 2019. "Do Minorities Misrepresent Their Ethnicity to Avoid Discrimination?," CESifo Working Paper Series 7861, CESifo.
    14. Nicolás Grau & Damián Vergara, "undated". "A Simple Test for Prejudice in Decision Processes: The Prediction-Based Outcome Test," Working Papers wp493, University of Chile, Department of Economics.
    15. Figlio, D. & Karbownik, K. & Salvanes, K.G., 2016. "Education Research and Administrative Data," Handbook of the Economics of Education,, Elsevier.
    16. Shi, Ying & Zhu, Maria, 2023. "“Model minorities” in the classroom? Positive evaluation bias towards Asian students and its consequences," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 220(C).
    17. Lavy, Victor & Sand, Edith, 2015. "On The Origins of Gender Human Capital Gaps: Short and Long Term Consequences of Teachers’ Stereotypical Biases," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1085, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    18. Ferman, Bruno & Fontes, Luiz Felipe, 2020. "Discriminating Behavior: Evidence from teachers’ grading bias," MPRA Paper 100400, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Matthias Stefan & Felix Holzmeister & Alexander Müllauer & Michael Kirchler, 2018. "Ethnical discrimination in Europe: Field evidence from the finance industry," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(1), pages 1-7, January.
    20. Tumen, Semih & Vlassopoulos, Michael & Wahba, Jackline, 2021. "Training Teachers for Diversity Awareness: Impact on School Attendance of Refugee Children," IZA Discussion Papers 14557, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    immigrants; teachers; implicit stereotypes; IAT; bias in grading;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:1817. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: . General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CReAM Administrator or Matthew Nibloe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.