Arab American Identity and Intergroup Bias (2016)

Undergraduate: Danny Rahal

Faculty Advisor: Beth Kurtz-Costes
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Arab Americans represent a unique group because, although they are considered Caucasian by the US Census Bureau, Arabs still experience discrimination in America. One form of discrimination experienced by Arab Americans and other minority groups from employers is ethnic name discrimination. Goals of the current study were to test whether Arab Americans showed similar biases regarding ethnic names as Caucasian Americans, and to test relationships between ethnic identity and ethnic-name bias. In the current study, 133 Arabs and 181 Caucasians rated how successful they believed 11 students would be based solely on their high school resumes. Participants rated sets of resumes that included two pairs of resumes that were identical except for the name, with two resumes bearing Anglo-American names and the other two bearing Arabic names. Participants also completed measures of ethnic identity. Neither Caucasians nor Arabs rated the identical resumes differently. However, Arab women rated one resume with an Arabic name significantly more positively than its Anglo-American counterpart. Additionally, rater bias was positively correlated with how closely women identified with being Arab, and was negatively correlated with how closely women identified with being American. This finding suggests that ethnic identity is related to the development of implicit intergroup bias.