PEOPLE may overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity.
“Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”
To investigate this overestimation, Kardosh and her colleagues carried out 12 psychological experiments with a total of 942 participants.
In one experiment, white people in the US were shown 100 faces, of which 25 per cent were Black people and the remaining 75 per cent were white, for 2 seconds. This was repeated 20 times with different sets of faces. The experiment was…
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New Scientist (Digital) - 1 Issue, 23-Apr-22