In the Name of the Neighbor: The Associations between Racial Attitudes, Intergroup Contacts, Ethnic Diversity, and the Perception of Names in the Dutch Speaking Part of Belgium

Abstract

AbstractCorrespondence testing is an increasingly used method to measure ethnic discrimination. Hereby researchers make use of names to signal ethnic origin. Nevertheless, it is rather rare that the used names are thoroughly pretested. Names are implicitly or explicitly assumed to contain clear signals of ethnic origin. Besides, individual differences in ethnic perceptions of names are ignored. Therefore, this study aims to analyze how the ethnic perception of Polish, Moroccan, Turkish, and Congolese names differ according to one’s negative racial attitudes and intergroup contacts as well as the ethnic diversity of the municipality where one resides. We conducted a survey among 990 ethnic majority members in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. People with more negative blatant attitudes find it harder to perceive the ethnic origin of names as compared to people with less negative blatant attitudes. The opposite holds for people with negative subtle attitudes. More ethnic diversity in the municipality where one resides makes it easier to recognize Moroccan, Turkish, and Congolese names, but not Polish names. This implies that the level of ethnic discrimination is probably underestimated among people with blatant racial attitudes, as well as among respondents that live in less diverse areas.