In the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at UNNC, we have a great many research-active academics who lecture about creative topics from all around the world. Our School of Economics is particularly famous and has received a high number of international grants and awards. As you can expect, our economics professors are very busy publishing, and their work is extremely high quality, receiving invitations and accolades from around the world. Over the past year, the research output has been extremely impressive, so we’re eager to learn more about what they produce and how they do their research.

This week, we caught up with Economics Professor Dr. Tom Lane, who was kind enough to talk us through his recent publication. Tom has turned his economics expertise towards reality television, producing research that sheds much light upon British society today. Keep reading below for an extremely fascinating economics paper!

Dr. Tom Lane

Hi Tom! Please tell us about your new publication!

It’s a study of discrimination in the British version of the popular reality TV show Big Brother. You’re probably familiar with the concept – a group of people are isolated in a house together for several months, with unpopular housemates gradually eliminated through nominations by the housemates themselves and subsequent public eviction votes towards those nominated. I focus on the housemates’ nominations: who do they want eliminated, and can this be predicted by characteristics like the race and gender of those eligible for nomination? After compiling the data from all series between 2000-2016, I found strong patterns of racial bias, with white housemates more likely to nominate minorities than fellow whites for eviction. Older housemates also tended to get nominated disproportionately often. There are serious economic consequences to this discrimination, as the show is a high-stakes environment, with the winners of the show earning prices around £100,000 and gaining lucrative publicity opportunities.

 

Wow! Yes, we know that show (I’m sure our readers do too!), it has been on television for a long time now. What inspired you to write about this topic?

Reality TV shows like Big Brother are, in some ways, social experiments. We can see how alliances naturally develop over a much longer period of time, and in a much more natural setting, than we could in a laboratory. This study provided an opportunity to see along which kind of lines these alliances would form. The results show that, even in the 21st century, people in Britain still prefer to associate with their own racial group, and so racial discrimination remains a problem in British society. On the other hand, I didn’t identify any discrimination on the basis of gender, geographical region or educational level.  

 

Fascinating, that’s so important to know, and very interesting. How did you conduct the research?

Thankfully, there are enough reality TV nerds out there that the results of every single nomination in Big Brother history – as well as information about the housemates, their age, where they are from, and so on – has been lovingly compiled on various fan sites. I created my dataset from those sites.

 

Haha! That must have been very useful! What support did you receive in your research?

None – I did it all by myself!

 

Well done, independent researchers are very impressive! Were there any surprises along the way?

I thought I might find housemates discriminated by social class (as proxied by their occupations, which I had data on). George Orwell described England as “the most class-ridden country under the sun”, but I didn’t find any evidence of housemates forming alliances on the basis of shared social class.

 

Again, fascinating stuff! We like it when research surprises us like this. What are your future research plans now?

I’m working on various different topics within the realm of behavioural economics, ranging from the influence of religious beliefs on charitable giving to the effects of laws on social norms. Discrimination remains a major interest.

 

That’s good to know, we’re glad you’re staying on the case. Finally, what is your advice to students who would like to study and research in your topic?

Start off with a specific question you are intrinsically interested in and want to answer. It needs to be a question you care about and will still care about after many painstaking hours collecting and analyzing the data! Only once the question is set, decide on the method. In economics, we use lots of different types of empirical methods: lab experiments, field experiments, statistical analysis of naturally occurring data, and much more. Some types of methods are more appropriate for answering some types of questions, so keep an open mind.