Stereotypes and Opportunities: Fostering Interactions and Awareness

Introduction

Stereotypes are often at the origin of biased behaviour and can contribute to the widening of socioeconomic inequalities in diverse societies. This is especially true in the schooling context, where both teachers and students may hold negative stereotypes towards certain groups. The overarching goal of this proposal is to study the formation of stereotypes and test policies designed to mitigate educational inequalities, building on insights from behavioural economics and causal machine learning techniques.

Innovative Aspects of the Research

The proposed research combines several innovative aspects:

1. Cutting-edge datasets merging administrative data with newly collected surveys, including psychological measures and incentivized experiments.
2. Quasi-natural experiments to shed light on the determinants of stereotypes and biased behaviour.
3. Randomized controlled trials to test scalable and cost-effective policies.

Work Packages

SOFIA is composed of three work packages (WP), focusing respectively on evidence from Italy, Finland, and Chile.

WP1: Gender Stereotypes

WP1 provides innovative evidence on:

• The role of selective memory in the formation of gender stereotypes for adolescents and teachers (Project A).
• How causal machine learning techniques can be used to mitigate inequalities (Project B).

WP2: Immigrant Exposure

WP2 focuses on:

• The implications of exposure to immigrants on the development of stereotypes and inter-ethnic relationships (Project C).
• How to improve social cohesion through innovative interventions that exploit behavioural insights (Project D).

WP3: Self-Stereotypes

WP3 investigates the role of self-stereotypes in explaining limited access to opportunities in education (Project E).

Policy Implications

The proposal speaks to the policy debate on how to effectively mitigate discrimination to foster educational achievements of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. It is my hope that the combination of innovative solutions inspired by behavioural insights and solid evidence generated through credible empirical strategies will help inform this debate.