Accents as Capital: Experimental Evidence from Colombia

• In Event: Ethnicity, State Capacity, and Democracy in Historical Latin America

Abstract

We examine how accents, as markers of cultural affinity and socioeconomic group membership, shape beliefs and attitudes toward others and the state. To disentangle the effect of class from other forms of capital (human and financial), we rely on conjoint experiments conducted in Bogotá, Colombia, in which class-based accents are randomly embedded in audio snippets, and respondents are provided with information about income and education, among other attributes. We find that individuals with high-class accents are more likely to be perceived as empathetic and trustworthy, and more likely to be befriended. This effect is even stronger in work-related contexts, where respondents prefer to share a workspace with individuals with a high-class accent and believe that these individuals receive a premium in the labor market. The effects are substantial, comparable in size, or even larger than for attributes such as having a postgraduate degree or belonging to the top of the country's income distribution. Migration, however, appears to attenuate these dynamics. Our results also show that increasing the salience of class reduces interpersonal and institutional trust but increases concerns about inequality, especially among low socioeconomic status (SES) respondents. These findings suggest that in highly segregated societies, class serves as an additional barrier to success and social mobility for those with low SES. Our paper has broad policy implications for addressing inequality and promoting social cohesion.

Authors

• Leopoldo Fergusson, Universidad de los Andes

• Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Harvard Business School

• Juana García Duque, Universidad de los Andes

• Michael Lee Weintraub, Universidad de los Andes