Att det förekommer diskriminering är klarlagt i tidigare forskning. Men vad baseras den på? I den nya svenska studien ”Is It How You Look or Speak That Matters? An Experimental Study Exploring the Mechanisms of Ethnic Discrimination” undersöks om människors bedömning av utländska personer är annorlunda än den av svenskar och om det i så fall beror på att de ser annorlunda ut eller på att de talar svenska med brytning:

The experiment is conducted in Sweden and the results show that candidates not perceived as stereotypically Swedish are considered to be worse performers. These beliefs are found in within-gender but not in cross-gender evaluations and are not eliminated when additional performance-related information about the candidates is provided. When candidates are presented by both looks and speech, differential evaluations based on looks disappear. Instead, we find strong negative beliefs about performance for candidates that speak Swedish with a foreign accent implying that ethnic stereotypes associated with speech override stereotypes associated with appearance. The negative beliefs associated with foreign-accented speech are not supported by corresponding mean differences in the candidates’ actual test performance.

Det är alltså utländsk brytning som får svenskar att tro att någon presterar sämre än dem utan brytning — trots att de faktiskt inte presterar sämre. Jag tycker om forskarnas konstaterande, i synnerhet dess andra del:

Our findings, on the one hand, stress the importance of language proficiency for subsequent labor market outcomes but, on the other hand, also the importance of an increasing tolerance for foreign-accented speech among the majority population.