Mitigating Discrimination through Structured Analogy

Rajesh Ramachandran, Devesh Rustagi and Emilia Soldani
Additional contact information
Rajesh Ramachandran: Monash University Malaysia
Emilia Soldani: NYU Abu Dhabi Dev Lab

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Can structured analogy between experiences of discrimination foster empathy and change behaviour? We leverage the relative nature of social status to first make discrimination against one's own group salient and then draw aparallel to discrimination faced by a marginalized group. We test whether this approach can mitigate caste-based discrimination through a randomized experiment involving 1,708 teachers in India. We implement structured analogy by showing treated teachers a high-caste Indian surgeon experiencing discrimination in the West, followed by a low-caste surgeon experiencing analogous discrimination in India. We measure behaviour through a correspondence study in which teachers grade identical answers bearing randomly assigned caste surnames. Control-group teachers penalize low-caste students for low-quality answers but award a modest premium for high-quality answers. The intervention eliminates negative discrimination while leaving positive discrimination largely unchanged. Patterns by baseline empathy and perceived analogy are consistent with empathy activation, whereas no such pattern emerges for social desirability. These findings highlight the potential of structured analogy to mitigate discrimination.

Keywords: Discrimination; Empathy; Teachers; Caste; Education; India JEL Classification: C90; D91; I24; J15; Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-exp, nep-sea, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp743.2025.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:743

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().