Is it the school of fish or the size of the pond that matters? An experimental examination of reference group effects in secondary school

It has often been suggested that reference group effects in education work through the self-concept of pupils.At the same time, it has been shown that teachers compare students with their peers when making evaluations.This observation gives rise to an alternative explanation of reference group effects on educational attainment: When deciding whether or not to recommend a student for grammar school, teachers consider not only the individual student's performance and abilities but use the wider group of motivated students as a frame of reference. Thus, given the limited number of places available in grammar school, a student's chances of being recommended also depend on his or her standing in the performance distribution as well as on the number of competitors. Using choice experiments presenting groups of three to five students to secondary school teachers in Switzerland, we show how the individual probability for a grammar school recommendation depends on the size of the reference group. Furthermore, individual chances are especially affected by the number of other students in the group that the teacher perceives as fit for grammar school. Our findings point towards a competition effect: The more and the better the competitors, the smaller the individual chances. In this respect, it seems better to be a big fish in a small pond.

A Reference Group Effect in the Misperception of the Black-White Income Gap

The goal of the present work was to determine if reference group effects influence the magnitude of misperception of the Black-White income gap. In prior research, large samples of Americans overestimate income equality between Black and White Americans, but that prior work used the same methodology where respondents were always asked to think of a typical or average White exemplar family prior to making estimates of the comparative income of a typical or average Black family. The results from an initial experiment suggest that reference group effects do shift misperceptions of Black-White income equality. When first thinking of a typical Black family a (N = 607) sample of respondents provided larger overestimates of Black-White income equality then when thinking of a White family first. Similar estimates were observed for participants using a scale versus a free response form for indicating their income gap perceptions. The results suggest that, when bringing a Black exemplar to mind first in the context of estimates of income disparities, Americans tend to bring to mind high status Black exemplars that skew conceptions of income disparities toward greater equality and widen errors in estimation of the Black-White income gap.