What is our project about?

This project aims to explore and explain a phenomenon that we propose to call misrecognitive discrimination. Discrimination is misrecognitive when it functions to communicate disrespect or disesteem for someone belonging to another group.

Main objectives

In this project, we want to identify objective interpersonal behaviours indicative of misrecognitive discrimination. Moreover, we want to investigate the proximate socio-emotional mechanisms underlying these interpersonal behaviours as well as their adaptive function in social relationships. The latter objective also entails an examination of the social and emotional impact of misrecognitive discrimination on the targets of such behaviours.

Methodology

Our project combines field, laboratory, and online experiments. The field experiments consist in observational studies conducted in the public transport systems of Paris, Brussels, and Vienna. These experiments feature social interactions with confederates wearing a variety of religious signs and performing simple help requests. The online experiments involve several questionnaires put in relation with social perception tasks. Finally, a laboratory experiment further investigates the relations between emotionality and social behaviour by measuring peripheral physiology and nonverbal social signals.

Research Team and Funding

• Marc Méhu, PhD (Principal Investigator)
• Gernot Gerger, PhD (Researcher)
• Lena Wittmann, MSc (Researcher)

Our research is funded by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF, project number I3645-G29) and is hosted at Webster Vienna Private University. It is part of an international collaboration with Martin Aranguren, PhD, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Université Paris Diderot.