Linking race and genes: racial conceptualization among genetic ancestry test-takers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The genomic revolution is highly relevant to scholarship on racial conceptualization. As genomic research has increasingly focused on small amounts of variation between ancestral groups, it may promote beliefs in racial essentialism. Genetic ancestry tests (GATs) are one of the primary ways the consequences of the genomic revolution are communicated to laypersons, necessitating a better understanding of how test-takers conceptualize race. We analyse 108 in-depth interviews with U.S. and Canadian test-takers to examine how they conceptualize the relationship between race and genes and how they believe GATs influenced their race concepts. We present a typology of racial conceptualization that moves beyond a dichotomy and toward a continuum between social constructivism and genetic essentialism. We also find that test-takers believe GATs reinforce their pre-existing race concepts, regardless of what those were. Our results support an emerging view that people selectively interpret genetic information to confirm rather than transform their race concepts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".