Along which identity lines does 21st-century Britain divide? Evidence from Big Brother

Abstract

This paper measures discrimination in the reality TV show Big Brother, a high-stakes environment. Data on contestants' nominations are taken from 35 series of the British version of the show, covering the years 2000-2016. Race and age discrimination are found, with contestants more likely to nominate those of a different race and those different in age from themselves. However, no discrimination is identified on the basis of gender, geographical region of origin, or level of education. Racial discrimination is driven by males, but females exhibit stronger age discrimination than males. Age discrimination is driven by the younger contestants discriminating against the older. Regional differences emerge, particularly between contestants from Greater London and those from the north of England; northerners have a stronger tendency to engage in racial and age discrimination, and to discriminate in favour of the opposite gender.3

Get her off my screen: taste-based discrimination in a high-stakes popularity contest

“…Big Brother is a reality TV show with a gameshow-like format. In each series of the show, contestants live together in a house for a period of weeks or months, filmed constantly, unable to leave and with 2 There have been several studies measuring discrimination from the behaviour of contestants on reality television shows (Dilks et al, 2010;Wall, 2011;Ahmed, 2013;Schüller et al, 2014;Lane, 2018). Research has also used behaviour on gameshows to estimate discrimination (Levitt, 2004;Antonovics et al, 2005;List, 2006;Anwar, 2012;Belot et al, 2012;Hamermesh, 2012;Atanasov and Dana, 2013).…”

“…First, the information on nominations and evictions is presented on both websites in a tabular form (see Figure A1 in the online Appendix for an example); if the wrong person was listed as being evicted in one round of voting, it would not be possible for contributors to correctly input the following round of nominations, so the mistake would likely be spotted and rectified. Furthermore, in a separate study on nominations in the UK versions of Big Brother, I cross-checked 200 nominations by watching YouTube footage of the episodes and found that in every case the information on Wikia or Wikipedia was accurate (Lane, 2018).…”