Double Standards or Social Identity? The Role of Gender and Ethnicity in Ability Perceptions in the Classroom

This study aims at disentangling the effects of status generalization and social identity processes on ability perceptions among early adolescents. Double standards theory predicts that people use different standards for making inferences about others’ abilities based on social status. Social identity processes, however, imply that people evaluate in-group members more positively than out-group members. We analyze cross-sectional dyadic peer nomination data from 21 primary school classes in Hungary (N = 392, X ˉ age = 13 years) with exponential random graph models. Next to ethnic self-identification, we use dyadic ethnic perceptions as a novel way of measuring ethnicity in the analysis. Our findings are mostly in line with social identity theory: Students are more likely to nominate in-group peers as clever compared with classmates from the out-group, in terms of both gender and ethnicity. Nonetheless, ethnic and gender biases in ability perceptions differ in some important ways