Co-ethnic preferences in a cooking game: a study based on Come Dine With Me in Sweden

Abstract

This study examines ethnic preferences using data from the television cooking show Come Dine With Me in Sweden. Amateur chefs compete by hosting dinner parties. Contestants rate each others' performance and the host with the highest ratings wins a cash prize. The show gives an unorthodox opportunity to study ethnic preferences in a high-stakes game environment. The analysis of the collected data shows that native Swedish contestants rate co-ethnic hosts significantly more favourably than they rate other hosts, demonstrating the existence of co-ethnic preferences. This observation seems to be an outcome of own-group favouritism rather than dislike against other groups. Also, the observed co-ethnic preference is assumed to be subtle or non-conscious based on the nature of the analysed data.

Keywords:

• co-ethnic preferences
• own-group favouritism
• high-stakes game
• television show
• prejudice
• discrimination

Acknowledgements

I would like to express gratitude to Lina Andersson, Dominique Anxo, Michael Banton, Mats Hammarstedt and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank participants at the Business and Social Science Research Conference in Dubai (3–4 January 2011) for useful discussions. Finally, I would like to thank Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for financial support.

Notes

1. For a review of laboratory experimental research on unequal treatment see Anderson, Fryer and Holt (2006), and for a review of field experiments on unequal treatment see Riach and Rich (2002).

2. There are also some other papers that study the behaviour of the television viewers rather than the contestants in different game shows: Kanazawa and Funk (2001); Aldrich, Arcidiacono and Vigdor (2005); Myers (2008); Lee (2009).

3. Examples are Dinner Takes All in the USA, Come Dine With Me Australia in Australia, and Un Diner Presque Parfait in France.

4. One euro was equivalent to 9.29 SEK on 24 January 2011. Hence, 15,000 SEK corresponds to about €1,615.

5. TV4 offers subscription to its shows on its website (http://www.tv4play.se/).

6. One week there was a group of three women and one man and, for two weeks, there was a group of three men and one woman. One week there was a group of pairs. All other weeks had two men and two women.

7. Eight episodes with celebrity contestants and four episodes with pairs of contestants were excluded. Another eight episodes were excluded because some of the contestants could not be categorized into a particular ethnic group.

8. This division of non-natives into Europeans and non-Europeans was reasonable because there were only three people from other Nordic countries than Sweden. Hence, they were therefore included in the European group. Furthermore, there were no contestants of North American or Australian origin.

9. Each week the contestants were always residents of the same city. The three largest cities in Sweden are Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö.

10. Gender is not in focus in the present study. But for the record, our analyses showed no significant effects of the contestants’ gender on the points awarded in the show. For a study of gender differences in competitiveness, see Ahmed (2011).

11. Non-Europeans have been defined earlier but just to be clear, non-Europeans means Asians, Africans and South Americans throughout this paper.

12. See, for example, Carlsson and Rooth (2007), Ahmed and Hammarstedt (2008), Arai and Skogman-Thoursie (2009) and Ahmed (2010) for some recent contributions on the disadvantages of ethnic minorities in various contexts.

13. Since the sample size in some of the cells in Table 4 was small, non-parametric tests were also performed. These resulted in similar p values and led to the same conclusion as the parametric test. The non-parametric results are available upon request.

14. A Fisher exact test generates similar p values.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Ahmed

ALI AHMED is Professor in the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University, and Pro Futura Scientia Research Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.