Discrimination by Teachers: Role of Attitudes, Beliefs, and Empathy

743/2025 Rajesh Ramachandran, Devesh Rustagi, Emilia Soldani

We investigate whether discrimination by teachers explains the large gap in educational outcomes between students from marginalized and non-marginalized groups. Using the context of India, we start with a correspondence study to show that teachers assign 0.29 standard deviations lower grade to an exam of equal quality but with a lower caste surname. We then conduct incentivized surveys, behavioral experiments, and vignettes to highlight some of the invisible elements that are critical to understanding discrimination. We find that teachers hold biased attitudes and beliefs about lower caste individuals, which are associated with poor grading outcomes. We conduct a mechanism intervention based on invoking empathy among teachers to mitigate discrimination. We find that discrimination disappears in the treatment group, and the effect is largest for teachers with higher baseline empathy. These findings are not due to social desirability. Our findings offer a proof-of-concept to understand mental processes that could be instrumental in designing policies to mitigate discrimination.

Designing and Building Institutions