Ethnic Identity and Discrimination among Children

We engaged almost 400 Canadian children aged five through eight years in a series of activities that were designed to reveal their beliefs about, self-identification with, and discrimination towards three ethnically phenotypic categories (White, East Asian, and South Asian). Our experiments took place at the children’s schools during their normal school day, allowing us to evaluate the salience and effects of ethnic identities on economically-relevant behavior in an important natural setting. We find that children from the dominant White category have a clear sense of White ethnic identity they perceive themselves to be most similar to other (anonymous) White children. White children also discriminate in favour of Whites in the dictator game, and about one-third of this pro-White bias can be accounted for by their perceived similarity to the ethnic categories. Minority East Asian children reveal a more complex ethnic identity; they perceive themselves to be equally similar to White and East Asian children. Unlike Whites, perceived similarity does not explain East Asian children’s allocations in the dictator game. If anything, East Asian children show out-group favoritism. a Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University b Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University c Department of Psychology, Bilkent University Corresponding author: Jane Friesen, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby B.C. V5A 1S6 Canada. [email protected] Acknowledgments: Mohsen Javdani and Benjamin Harris provided the geographic linkage between our experimental data and Census information about neighborhood characteristics. We are grateful to Brian Krauth and Michele Battisti for helpful comments. Financial support was provided by Metropolis British Columbia and Simon Fraser University’s Community Trust Endowment Fund.