Their findings, outlined this month in a study in the journal Social Studies of Science, show that yes, even members who fail to meet their own genetic standards will sometimes share the results.
In response, their fellow white nationalists tend to console them by offering potential reasons the results can’t be trusted. Among them: skepticism about the tests’ interpretations of the science or statistics, conspiracy theories about Jewish-owned genetic testing companies’ multicultural agendas, and reminders about alternative ways of measuring whiteness.
To Dr. Panofsky and Dr. Donovan, that meant trying to counter hate by getting white nationalists to consider that they actually arethe people they hate was not going to work: Members of such groups are too determined to help each other see what they want to see.
The findings add to an already robust body of scholarship that shows how difficult it is to get people to alter pre-existing views, said Jonathan Baron, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study. “People go to extraordinary lengths to maintain beliefs to which they are committed,” he said.
He pointed to a classic 1979 study that asked subjects to evaluate summaries of studies about whether the death penalty deters crime. In general, the subjects found flaws only in studies that contradicted their beliefs.
Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist and the author of the book “The Enigma of Reason,” said in an email that the new study reminded him of another example of so-called dissonance reduction involving people who planned their lives around the arrival of a flying saucer, which would save them from the coming apocalypse.
“When the aliens didn’t show up (surprise), some group members left, but most stayed and found reasons to explain away their failed prophecy,” he wrote.
To construct the white nationalist study, the authors searched the Stormfront website using an array of keywords for every posting about a genetic test from 2004 to 2016. Amid requests for dating advice and proposals to start new political parties, they found around 650 items that qualified.
Next, they coded the postings according to whether they challenged or confirmed the desired white identity, then did the same for the community responses. In about 100 out of 1,500 responses, users shamed the posters for failing to be white enough.
But Dr. Panofsky said he was struck by how many more responses focused on what he called “repairing conversation,” as in “Don’t worry about it; this is how you should think about it.”
In hundreds of other responses, users delegitimized the testing company and genetic tests generally or suggested the possibilities of statistical or technical errors.
“Science cannot save us,” Dr. Panofsky said, noting that in the years since he first began working on this study, genetic tests have increasingly been used to encourage the “mainstreamification” of white nationalism. “The political problem of white nationalism needs to be confronted on the level of values and law enforcement,” he said.
What Dr. Mercier, who was not involved in the study, found even more fascinating than users’ tendency to see what they wanted was that more than 50 people chose to disclose DNA results that contradicted their desired identity.
“Maybe these posters aren’t 100 percent sure about their involvement in the white nationalist movement, and they want to make sure they’d be accepted,” he suggested.
It is impossible to know whether that was indeed going through their minds, however, because the researchers did not interview the posters directly. That also means the researchers cannot be sure that the DNA tests even belonged to the users who posted them.
Despite those limitations, Wendy D. Roth, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was well-executed study. In her own work, she has found an inverse dynamic: white people who take genetic tests hoping to find something that makes them feel more “exotic.”
But like the white nationalists, they were also inclined to use only the information that was convenient for them: If a bit of Native American ancestry seemed as if it would impress their friends, for example, then they would embrace it. If they worried they wouldn’t be taken seriously, or thought they might be criticized, then they wouldn’t.
Obviously, this type of selective retention is more benign than selective retention intended to rationalize acts of violence, social exclusion and racist hierarchies. Nonetheless, it’s far from consequence-free, Dr. Roth said. She called it “a new form of white privilege.”
“They can reveal and benefit from that feeling of being unique, exotic or distinctive without having to experience the disadvantage that members of those groups have traditionally experienced,” she said.
Dr. Roth also warned that the growing embrace of ancestral testing may broadly encourage a racist or ethnocentric worldview.
Multicultural Meanderings 