Is Ethnicity Identifiable? Lessons from an Experiment in South Africa

Ethnicity is frequently posited as an important factor in civil violence and other political contexts. Despite the significant attention that ethnicity receives, its effect depends on an important, but mostly ignored, assumption: that ethnicity is identifiable within and across groups. There is likely considerable variation in peoples’ abilities to identify each other. Certain individuals within groups might be better at identifying others' ethnicities; further, different types of information might aid identification better. We contend in this paper that the strength of an individual's ethnic identity influences her ability to identify others correctly. We consider this argument using an experiment in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in which individuals attempted to identify members of all of the major black ethnic groups. We find that the average individual struggles to identify ethnicity correctly in many conditions. Individuals with a stronger ethnic identity, however, are better at correctly identifying the ethnicity of others relative to the average individual. When we allow deceptive information, individuals with stronger identities were deceived more easily than others. These results have implications for a diverse set of studies relying on the identifiability assumption. Acknowledgments: We thank James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein for sharing information about their research including preand post-study survey questions and Jamie Druckman, James Kuklinski, and Dan Nielson for helpful comments on this manuscript. 2 “One morning, while we were eating before going to mass, they closed the windows and the gates. Then some boys from another school came in the dining hall and circled the tables. I was trembling. The boys shouted, ‘Get up, Tutsis. All the Tutsis stand up.’ There was a boy from my hill at home. We went to primary school together, and he said, ‘You Odette, you sit down, we know you’ve been a Hutu forever.’ Then some other boy came and pulled my hair and said, ‘With this hair, we know you’re a Tutsi.’” (Gourevitch 1998, 66-67).