Research

"Internalized Racism in Africa Settings: A Pernicious but Overlooked Social Malady" (under review)

Internalized racism occurs when members of disadvantaged racial groups consciously or unconsciously accept racial inequality. Despite the substantial emphasis African scholars and activists place on psychological harm from racial ideologies, internalized racism research remains overwhelmingly focused on populations in the United States. This paper shifts the focus to African settings. Drawing extensively on African accounts from scholarship, focus group discussions, and open-ended survey items, this paper demonstrates how and why internalized racism remains relevant in contemporary Africa. While dating to at least the colonial era, internalized racism and racial inequality persist in post-colonial African societies and continuously reinforce one another. Although African accounts of accounts of internalized racism are largely concurrent with existing psychological and sociological literature, substantial contextual differences nonetheless underline the need for reserach focused specifically on African experiences. This paper sets the stage for social scientists to responsibly explore and systematically document the character, prevalence, origins, and implications of internalized racism among African citizenries. Additional scholarship on internalized racism can serve to advance conceptual understanding of the phenomenon and to better inform public policy.

A current draft of the paper is available here.

“Tracking Leakages in the Local Distribution of Development Goods Using iBeacon Technology” with Muthoni Nganga and Daniel N. Posner (under review)

The leakage of development goods is a major challenge for governments and a preoccupation of development practitioners and academic researchers. Although commonly reported and lamented, such leakage is challenging to quantify. We address this evidentiary blind spot by piloting the use of iBeacon technology to track how village elders distribute solar lanterns within off-grid communities in western Kenya. We provide evidence on the efficacy of the technology for detecting the lanterns and tracking their movement, finding substantial improvement in performance over previous generations of technology. In addition, we draw on survey data to understand why some households received lanterns and others did not. We find evidence consistent with the faithful execution of program guidelines, as well as evidence for the distribution of lanterns to households with needs along dimensions beyond our designated criterion. Our findings run against common depictions of local African elites as predatory actors and suggest the need to rethink the common equation of ``leakage'' with malfeasance. A companion paper specifically discusses ethical concerns and how the design process addressed these concerns.

A current draft of the main paper is available here, while a current draft of the companion paper is available here.

“Uncovering Ethnic Discrimination: Using Distraction to Detect Hidden Bias in Economics Games” with Chad Hazlett and Daniel N. Posner (working paper)

Behavioral economics games such as the Dictator Game (DG) have been widely used to quantify ethnic and other between-group biases. However, in numerous contexts where ethnicity is thought to be extremely salient, the DG has failed to detect any evidence of ethnic bias. A compelling hypothesis for this failure is that economics games like the DG permit participants to alter their behavior to fit social norms that discourage ethnic bias or discrimination. Drawing on dual process models from psychology, we induce cognitive load through a concurrently played distraction task (the Spatial Delayed Recall Task) in a within-subjects experimental design. If self-monitoring explains the apparent lack of ethnic bias in the DG, and if self-monitoring can be reduced through such distraction, then a proportion of bias may be “unmasked” when the DG is played concurrently with the distraction task. We calibrated the difficulty of the SDRT in a separate pilot study with over 200 participants. We deploy this design among 558 Kikuyu and Luo participants in Nairobi, Kenya, a setting in which previous DG studies failed to produce evidence of ethnic bias among these groups even though ample evidence can be found for the salience of such bias in daily life. Contrary to expectations, we find no evidence of differential ethnic bias across DGs conducted with and without the distraction task, notwithstanding evidence that the distraction task does in fact (modestly) increase cognitive load. We conclude that the inability of DGs to detect ethnic bias is likely not because they permit self-monitoring and social desirability bias.

A current draft of the paper is available here.