Race and perception of human diversity: Five European case studies.

Abstract

Against the background of the results of surveys carried out previously on American, Polish, and European academics, we present new data on the perception of races among non-biological anthropologists. In five case studies, we surveyed 585 respondents belonging to the academic community (of biologists and cultural anthropologists) and ordinary people from three European countries: Poland, Czech Republic and England. All groups were concordant on the question "Are there [biological] races in humans?" - replying mostly in the affirmative. For the number of races that humans can be divided into, respondents' views were discordant depending on the society they live in. Regarding opinions about supposed racial characteristics, the response patterns of all groups were again much alike: The vast majority of the participants thought of human races in terms of morphological differences, but mostly did not see an association between race and intelligence, personality and religion. We suggest that the persistence of racial thinking about human diversity depends, to a large extent, on schooling and education, and certainly is a consequence of lack of academic and public discourse on race.