A talk by Luca Váradi (Central European University).
Abstract:
Ethnic prejudice can be highly contagious and an unquestioned norm in some societies, coupled with deep ethnic divides. In Hungary, Roma people face systematic exclusion and discrimination both from public institutions and private actors. Inspired by Paluck et al.’s (2021) review of the effectiveness of interventions against prejudice and the gap they identified regarding reliable data from field experiments testing behavioural outcomes, we conducted a series of experimental studies establishing the level of discrimination and testing the effectiveness of two types of interventions in the context of anti-Roma discrimination in the Hungarian rental housing market. In Study 1, we tested the prevalence of discrimination of Roma people in a field experiment (N=2067). In Study 2, using a similar design, we tested whether sharing information on social status would matter for the discrimination of Roma people on the rental housing market (N=600). In Study 3, we conducted a survey experiment among landlords (N=267) to test the effectiveness of a perspective-taking intervention based on a short documentary film, and found positive results. In Study 4 (N=140), we tested the effectiveness of a tool embedded within an advertisement platform, aimed at spreading the norm of antidiscrimination through a field experiment, with promising results. We discuss our findings by asking the question of how interventions can be implemented and tested in the real world and how they can be translated into effective policies.
