Therese Nilsson och jag publicerade förra året en studie i vilken vi finner att ju högre grad av öppenhet för internationell handel och internationella kapitalrörelser i ett land, desto mer antisemitism återfinns i det landet. Det tyder på att det finns en koppling mellan ekonomisk öppenhet, människors föreställningar om hur judar agerar i den finansiella världsekonomin och en negativ syn på judar. Nu har en ny studie, ”The Downside of Moralizing Financial Markets: Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in German MTurkers”, publicerats some experimentellt undersöker följande:

[W]e investigate whether an arbitrary characteristic of an investor (i.e., a Jewish or non-Jewish name) influences the moral evaluation of an investment itself. Put differently, we elicit whether the way people tend to evaluate financial activities is influenced by anti-Semitic stereotypes. Is the same investment more often evaluated as immoral if the investor happens to have a name that is perceived as Jewish? 

Hur genomfördes experimentet? Så här:

The aim of the main study was to measure the effect of the perception of an investor’s name as Jewish or non-Jewish … on the evaluation of a given investment as immoral. For this purpose, we used a between-subjects design that randomly assigned each participant a vignette (a hypothetical situation) about an investment decision … The only factor that varied between participants was the name of the investor; everything else in the vignette remained constant.

The vignette read as follows:

NAME was born in Munich in 1974. The 45-year-old works as an associate in a Munich IT company in mid-level management. He has invested the money inherited from an aunt (around EUR 50,000), with which she had intended to finance his children’s studies, in shares in German and American companies. NAME’s selection of shares focused on automobile manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and commodity companies. He will observe the shares’ performances on the smartphone and try to react to strong market movements.

Below the vignette, respondents were asked to indicate their agreement with the following statement: “He behaves morally badly”. Notice that our intention was not to disentangle why exactly subjects would evaluate the respective behavior to be morally bad, but mainly to identify a difference in the composite evaluations between the conditions with Jewish and with non-Jewish names. 

Vad fann då forskarna?

When presented vignettes with investors whose names had been perceived as Jewish, 34.8% (24/69) of participants either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that the investor behaved morally badly. However, when presented vignettes with investors whose German name had been perceived as non-Jewish, only 14.5% (8/55) of participants agreed or strongly agreed with this claim.

Med andra ord visade det sig, även i regressionsanalys, att de tyska experimentdeltagarna fann beteendet i fråga klandervärt i högre grad om det rörde sig om en judisk person.

I dagens svenska debatt fokuseras mycket på antisemitism bland muslimer. Det är förvisso ett stort och viktigt problem. Men det är också viktigt att minnas att det finns föreställningar om judar, inte minst på det ekonomiska området, bland icke-muslimska européer, som är djupt problematiska.