Stereotypes Are More Powerful When People Like to Agree with Each Other

• In Event: Democratic Ideals and Practices given Discriminatory Conventions and Stereotypes

Abstract

I find that among 119 academic fields, the more skewed the citation distribution of papers published in the field, the lower the percentage of doctoral recipients who are women. If the citation distribution in a field is more skewed, a smaller percentage of papers receive most of the citations, which indicates a greater preference to agree on which papers should be cited. This empirical result illustrates the argument, which I make in a game-theoretic model, that stereotypes are more powerful when people like to agree with each other. This finding is pertinent to the effective and non-discriminatory functioning of peer-review processes, which in turn underlies the institutionalization of due process.

Author

• Michael Chwe, UCLA