TY - JOUR

T1 - Remember me?

T2 - The role of gender and racial attributes in memory

AU - Belot, Michèle

AU - Schröder, Marina

N1 - Funding Information: Stimulus images courtesy of Michael J. Tarr, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, http://www.tarrlab.org/. Funding provided by NSF award 0339122. We used a subset of pictures (we removed those where the person had uncommon accessories such as a hat or a piercing), consisting of 75 pictures of Caucasian whites and 29 East Asians. To avoid the task to be about picture recognition rather than person recognition, we use pictures with different profile orientation (front facing or face turned left or right by 15 to 45 degrees). Funding Information: We thank seminar participants at the European University Institute, FAIR at NHH in Bergen, the University of Edinburgh, Cornell, Cologne, and University of Hannover and conference participants at the annual meeting of the German Economic Association, EALE, the annual meeting of the VfS and the GfeW. We are especially thankful to Tommaso Battistoni for excellent research assistance. Marina Schröder thanks the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 456592273 for financial support.

PY - 2023/6

Y1 - 2023/6

N2 - Remembering people is at the core of many social and economic relationships. We present evidence of systematic biases in the way we remember people, based on two experiments. The first experiment is conducted in a real professional setting - academia. Participants of two academic conferences are asked to recall ‘who presented what’ a month after attending the conferences. The second experiment is a controlled version of the first. Participants are shown pictures of people, matched with the title of a paper. We exogenously vary the relative shares of women and non-white individuals. In both experiments, we find evidence that women and ethnic minorities are more likely to be remembered in settings where they are in a small minority. In contrast, they are more likely to be confused with each other when they are in larger fraction. These findings are in line with a theory of categorization. People with minority attributes appear to be “blended together.” We conjecture that these biases in remembering could have important implications for the formation of professional networks.

AB - Remembering people is at the core of many social and economic relationships. We present evidence of systematic biases in the way we remember people, based on two experiments. The first experiment is conducted in a real professional setting - academia. Participants of two academic conferences are asked to recall ‘who presented what’ a month after attending the conferences. The second experiment is a controlled version of the first. Participants are shown pictures of people, matched with the title of a paper. We exogenously vary the relative shares of women and non-white individuals. In both experiments, we find evidence that women and ethnic minorities are more likely to be remembered in settings where they are in a small minority. In contrast, they are more likely to be confused with each other when they are in larger fraction. These findings are in line with a theory of categorization. People with minority attributes appear to be “blended together.” We conjecture that these biases in remembering could have important implications for the formation of professional networks.

KW - Discrimination

KW - Experiment

KW - Gender

KW - Memory

KW - Race

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85150844269&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.socec.2023.102008

DO - 10.1016/j.socec.2023.102008

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85150844269

VL - 104

JO - Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

JF - Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

SN - 2214-8043

M1 - 102008

ER -