Among those with higher genetic knowledge, at-home ancestry tests may decrease beliefs in racial essentialism--the idea that race is purely genetic and determines innate abilities--while increasing such beliefs among people with low genetic knowledge. Wendy Roth of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 29, 2020.
Genetic racial essentialism holds that genes determine races and associated innate abilities, and is associated with extreme forms of racism. Social science rejects essentialism, holding that race is socially constructed. However, the recent rise of at-home genetic ancestry tests has raised the question of whether the tests might promote essentialist views of race or reinforce that race is socially constructed.
Roth and colleagues have now conducted the first randomized controlled trial to address this question. They randomly assigned 802 white Americans to receive at-home genetic ancestry testing or no testing at all, and evaluated the participants' pre- and post-testing views on connections between genetics and race.
The researchers found that genetic ancestry testing had no significant average impact on beliefs about essentialism. However, among test takers with high genetic knowledge, racial essentialist views decreased after testing. Meanwhile, essentialist views increased among test takers with the least genetic knowledge. The findings suggest that people's understanding of genetics may influence the impact of ancestry testing and polarize test takers' views on racial essentialism.
Further research could help confirm these findings and investigate whether boosting genetic knowledge among people who take at-home ancestry tests could decrease their essentialist beliefs.
Wroth adds: "A lot of scholars have worried that taking genetic ancestry tests might make people believe in an essentialist view of race - a view that race is determined entirely by our genes and that races are genetically better or worse at different kinds of things, and that is associated with racist attitudes. The paper shows that overall, taking genetic ancestry tests doesn't change people's belief in racial essentialism on average, but it suggests that their understanding of genetics before they take the test really matters. For people in our study who had the highest knowledge of genetics, their belief in racial essentialism went down after taking a test; but for people with the lowest knowledge of genetics, their belief in racial essentialism went up. I hope that this study helps people realize that it's important to understand the genetics behind these tests before you take them."
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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227399
Citation: Roth WD, Yaylac? ?, Jaffe K, Richardson L (2020) Do genetic ancestry tests increase racial essentialism? Findings from a randomized controlled trial. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227399
Funding: This research was funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#435- 2014-0467; WR), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (#23744; WR), and a UBC Killam Faculty Research Fellowship (WR). Kaitlyn Jaffe is supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and by the University of British Columbia Public Scholars Initiative. Lindsey Richardson is supported by a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar award and Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator (MSH 217672) and Foundation (FDN-154320) awards." The funders and Family Tree DNA had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Contact: Emese M. Bordy, emese.bordy@uct.ac.za, Ph.: +27 71 816 3246
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PLOS ONE