Expanding Experimental Investigations of Race/Ethnicity in Sociology

A conference supported by the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation, Texas A&M University and Northern Illinois University

Experimental sociology has contributed to important theoretical developments relevant to understanding race and ethnicity issues. These include identity processes, trust and cooperation perceptions and behavior, issues related to emotion and affect, stereotyping and labeling, differential reward allocation, and legitimacy. But there have been surprisingly little recent additions to the empirical literature on race and ethnicity and little direct reference to these theoretical additions in the race/ethnicity literature.

The FAD conference is designed 1) to identify perceived incentives and barriers to studying aspects of race/ethnicity experimentally; (2) to map out a set of topics, recognized as important by both micro and macro sociologists, that can be investigated experimentally; and (3) to foster collaborations between established experimenters and new experimenters to assist in developing experimental designs for experimental studies of topics in race and ethnicity.