The impact of socioeconomic and phenotypic traits on self-perception of ethnicity in Latin America

Carolina Paschetta,Francisco Rothhammer,Orlando Pérez,Virginia Ramallo,Andrés Ruiz-Linares,Pablo Navarro,Mirsha Quinto Sánchez,Carla Gallo,Celia Cintas,Rolando González-José,Kaustubh Adhikari,Gabriel Bedoya,Lucas Bandieri,Soledad De Azevedo,Giovanni Poletti Ferrara,Victor Acuña Alonzo,M Catira Bortolini

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-92061-x

Abstract

Self-perception of ethnicity is a complex social trait shaped by both, biological and non-biological factors. We developed a comprehensive analysis of ethnic self-perception (ESP) on a large sample of Latin American mestizos from five countries, differing in age, socio-economic and education context, external phenotypic attributes and genetic background. We measured the correlation of ESP against genomic ancestry, and the influence of physical appearance, socio-economic context, and education on the distortion observed between both. Here we show that genomic ancestry is correlated to aspects of physical appearance, which in turn affect the individual ethnic self-perceived ancestry. Also, we observe that, besides the significant correlation among genomic ancestry and ESP, specific physical or socio-economic attributes have a strong impact on self-perception. In addition, the distortion among ESP and genomic ancestry differs across age ranks/countries, probably suggesting the underlying effect of past public policies regarding identity. Our results indicate that individuals’ own ideas about its origins should be taken with caution, especially in aspects of modern life, including access to work, social policies, and public health key decisions such as drug administration, therapy design, and clinical trials, among others.

Highlights

Self-perception of ethnicity is a complex social trait shaped by both, biological and non-biological factors
Regarding the using of “ethnic self-perception” in the present research, it is important to note that we focus on how individuals estimates their own ancestry, rather than how people identifies themselves with a particular ethnic label or category, which is perhaps a more widespread definition
We studied a sample of 6094 adult volunteers from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Peru) included in the CANDELA survey

Summary

Introduction

Self-perception of ethnicity is a complex social trait shaped by both, biological and non-biological factors. Distortions cannot be defined as as is the case of people declaring low self-perception of Native ethnicity in México, or European ethnicity in Brazil, whose genomic ancestry corresponds to a wide range of distribution, that is low, intermediate and high ancestry.

Results

Conclusion