Previous research has established that people shift their identities situationally and may come to subconsciously mirror one another. We explore this phenomenon among survey interviewers in the 2004-2018 General Social Survey by drawing on repeated measures of racial identification collected after each interview. We find not only that interviewers self-identify differently over time but also that their response changes cannot be fully explained by several measurement-error related expectations, either random or systematic. Rather, interviewers are significantly more likely to identify their race in ways that align with respondents’ reports. The potential for affiliative identification, even if subconscious, has a range of implications for understanding race-of-interviewer effects, the social construction of homophily, and for how we consider causality in studies of race and racial inequality more broadly.

中文翻译：

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互动中的认同：访谈者和受访者之间的种族镜像

先前的研究已经证实，人们会根据具体情况改变自己的身份，并可能会在潜意识中互相模仿。我们利用每次访谈后收集的重复种族认同测量数据，在 2004-2018 年综合社会调查中探讨了调查访谈者中的这一现象。我们发现，不仅访谈者的自我认同会随着时间的推移而有所不同，而且他们的反应变化也不能用几种与测量误差相关的期望（无论是随机的还是系统的）来完全解释。相反，采访者更有可能以与受访者报告一致的方式来识别他们的种族。归属认同的潜力，即使是潜意识的，对于理解采访者种族效应、同质性的社会建构，以及我们如何更广泛地考虑种族和种族不平等研究中的因果关系，都有一系列影响。