A recent study conducted at the University of British Columbia (UBC) found a researcher’s race and gender can have an impact on their perceived credibility.
The study asked more than 900 participants in Canada, the United States, and India to read the same research article and were shown different photographs of professors of varied race and gender who supposedly authored the article. Participants then had to rate the professor’s credibility on a scale of one to seven.
The study concluded participants whose political views were at either extreme on a spectrum between “elitist” or “egalitarian” ideologies were likely to be influenced by the race and gender of the professor. The participants’ political views were assessed in a separate survey.
Those surveyed tending toward an elitist worldview were more inclined to judge white male researchers as more credible.
People who ascribed to egalitarian beliefs were more likely to judge women or people of colour as more credible researchers.
“I expected to draw the one [conclusion], which was that people who have a more elitist view about how the world should be are going to probably be more likely to discriminate against minorities and women,” said Karl Aquino, who co-authored the survey and is a professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. “The other way, I was not so certain about.”
“It might be people who have this kind of extreme belief that everyone should be equal and we should all be treated the same, and it might be that they go in the totally opposite direction,” Aquino said. “We read a lot of stories about how people really like it when an underdog is successful—it’s not an uncommon phenomenon.”
Aquino—who is Filipino—said the study was inspired by his own experiences with discrimination.
After conducting an interview with The Globe and Mail about a prior study, Aquino noticed how he and a co-researcher, who is white and male, were being perceived differently. Aquino said in The Globe and Mail story—which ran a picture of him—there were a number of derogatory remarks said about him in the comments section.
Aquino said his colleague, had his picture alongside the article in another edition, did not receive any of the same derogatory comments for the same research.
Cameron Aitken, an education manager at the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity and fourth-year student at Carleton University, said he has been in positions where he felt his race and gender impacted his credibility. As an education manager, his role involves making educational presentations to groups with his partner, Hannah Collins.
“I’ve definitely had moments in presentations where people would listen to me over Hannah, because they read me as a man and read Hannah as a woman,” Aitken said. “They would take my word for it where they wouldn’t take Hannah’s, and people would defer to me more often.”
Aitken said he also noticed a difference in his perceived credibility depending on the institutions backing his presentations. If Aitken told his audience that the school board had sent him, schools would treat him differently, he said.
Aquino said this was another conclusion his study was able to draw.
“We showed you can make the [race and gender] effect go away,” he said. “If both professors come from Harvard, if the prestige is high enough, regardless of your race and gender, people will believe that you must know what you’re talking about.”
Aquino said the study didn’t seek to provide solutions to combat discrimination, but it suggests one of the best ways to improve objectivity in academia is to avoid having decisions made by those with extreme views.
“The point we make in the article was that if you look at the people in the middle of this distribution of elitist versus egalitarian, they don’t discriminate,” he said.
