Policies that demolish or restructure neighborhoods because of their high concentrations of ethnic minorities rest on the assumption that residents and outsiders accurately perceive these areas as disorderly and declining. We test whether that perception tracks objective conditions or is instead triggered by the mere sight of minority-coded individuals. In a randomized experiment with over 1,500 Danish adults, we show that viewing an otherwise identical street scene containing a visibly Muslim-looking family versus a White majority family causes respondents to rate the same street as significantly more disordered and to describe it in more derogatory terms. The bias is largest among people with little daily exposure to ethnic diversity and disappears in the most diverse neighborhoods, suggesting that democratic pressure for minority-targeted urban interventions may partly reflect perceptual bias rather than genuine neighborhood decline.

How accurately do minority and majority group members perceive the extent of ethnic discrimination in society? Theoretical and empirical scholarship on this question is rare and arguably underdeveloped. This presentation develops three experimental approaches to study misperceptions. A survey experiment measures citizens' beliefs about the results of field experiments testing for discrimination. Trust games measure expected and actual name-based ethnic discrimination on the same scale, allowing direct comparison. A follow-up experiment then presents participants with randomly assigned payoff comparisons to study whether they correctly perceive disparities as reflecting intentional discrimination or as an instance of bad luck.

How do misperceptions about socio-ecological inequality shape public support for climate policy? This study uses a survey experiment in which respondents estimate the relative burden of green investments on lower-income families compared to wealthier households. We hypothesize that correcting misperceptions — by providing factual information about actual income and emissions differences — will increase support for redistributive climate policies. When respondents sense that some groups bear a disproportionate burden, they are more likely to back ambitious initiatives if those initiatives include redistribution.

Prior research links far-right party victories to increased racism and hate crimes, raising concerns about their potential impact on public service access for minorities. This study investigates whether such victories influence public administrators — expected to be impartial — to discriminate against minorities accessing a general medical practitioner. Using a novel Differences-in-Regression-Discontinuities approach, we conducted a field experiment in Italy in which individuals with native-Italian and West-African accents contacted municipalities near the electoral threshold for far-right mayors. Compared to native-Italian callers, individuals with West-African accents faced significantly closer scrutiny and higher denial rates, a disparity amplified at the electoral threshold for far-right victories.

The disadvantages experienced by minorities and the lack of societal remedies for them are widely believed to be partly attributable to mainstream-majority citizens' limited awareness of minority hardships. This study investigates whether informing citizens about field-experimental evidence of ethno-racial discrimination increases their recognition of the issue and support for equal-treatment policies. The results indicate that citizens are generally aware of discrimination and even tend to overperceive its extent. Communicating field-experimental results corrects and converges misperceptions but does not change recognition of the problem or support for equal-treatment policies, regardless of how the evidence is framed. These findings suggest evidence-based awareness campaigns have limited immediate success in promoting policy support: citizens may donate to acknowledge minority hardships but hesitate to endorse policies that could affect their group's privileged position.