Researchers from the University of British Columbia discovered that when people take genetic ancestry tests, they are not necessarily going to stand by whatever results they find. In reality, people tend to “cherry-pick” which races they want to be a part of based on their biases.
The promise of ancestry testing, now a billion-dollar industry led by sites like Ancestry.com, may lie in its ability to connect many to different places and cultures, considering how our ancestors intermingled. But that’s not how it works out in practice. As write sociologists, who published their research in the American Journal of Sociology, rather than take ownership and face up to all their genetic test results, people would rather identify with some ethnicities they regard as positive and ignore others.
Wendy Roth, associate professor in the department of sociology and the lead author of the study, thinks that people are often looking for only a certain kind of result when they sign up for such testing:
“People often buy these genetic ancestry tests because they’re looking for a sense of belonging or to confirm a story that’s been passed down in their family,” said Roth. “But if the test results don’t support what they want to believe, we found that people will often ignore the results or criticize them. We tend to cherry-pick the parts of our family story that we like most and want to emphasize.”
The study involved a 100 American participants who were interviewed before and 18 months after they took a genetic test. They were identified before the test as white, black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Native American. The questions related to the ethnic and racial identities of the participants during their lives. The follow-up after the testing served to see how the results affected them.
One participant, “Eduardo”, saw himself as a Mexican-American before the test, but his results revealed he was also part Native American, Celtic and Jewish. The researchers found that he disregarded the Celtic part of his ancestry but felt connected to his Jewish identity, saying “I always looked up to the Jewish people… I thought of them as higher than me.”
In another example, the participant “Shannon” was adopted and always thought she had Native American heritage. When the results showed no Native American ancestry, she decided the results were not correct and did not stop identifying as Native American.
The researchers found that white participants were more likely to be open to new racial identities, as long as they thought others would continue to accept them.
“White identity is something that lots of people around them have, so it doesn’t feel special,” explained Roth. “Part of it may be guilt about being white and feeling somewhat privileged. They want something that makes them feel unique, whereas for many people of colour, they’ve known all along that they have some racial mixture in their ancestry, and it’s not as surprising.”
She also cautioned to be very careful when choosing genetic tests and to be clear on what the results actually mean, as they are often misleading.
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Finalist: Greater Commons - Todd McLeod
Greater Commons, founded by Todd McLeod and Andrew Cull, is an organization that helps people live happier, more successful and fulfilling lives through agile learning. The current education system is inefficient and exclusionary, in which many students who end up earning a degree, if at all, enter a career not related to their field of study. Greater Commons solves this problem and gap in post-high school secondary education in a variety of ways. Passionately and diligently, Great Commons helps others obtain skills, knowledge, wisdom, motivation, and inspiration so that they may live better lives.
Finalist: PeerFoward - Keith Frome
PeerForward is an organization dedicated to increasing the education and career success rates of students in low-income schools and communities by mobilizing the power of positive peer influence. PeerForward works with partner schools to select influential students as a part of a team, systemizing the "peer effect." Research in the fields of sociology of schools, social-emotional learning, adult-youth partnerships, and civic education demonstrates that students can have a positive effect on the academic outcomes of their peers. PeerForward is unique through its systemic solutions to post-secondary education.
Finalist: Cogniss - Leon Young
Cogniss combines technology and best practice knowledge to enable anyone to innovate and share solutions that advance lifelong learning. Cogniss is the only platform to integrate neuroscience, through which it solves the problem of access by providing a low-code platform that enables both developers and non-developers to build sophisticated education apps fast, and at a much lower cost. It addresses the uneven quality of edtech solutions by embedding research-based learning design into its software. App creators can choose from a rich set of artificial intelligence, game, social and data analytics, and gamification to build their perfect customized solution.
Finalist: Practera - Nikki James
Practera's mission is to create a world where everyone can learn through experience. Today's workplaces are increasingly dynamic and diverse, however, costly and time-consuming experiential learning is not always able to offer the right opportunities at scale. Many students graduate without developing the essential skills for their chosen career. Practera's team of educators and technologists see this problem as an opportunity to transform the educational experience landscape, through a CPL pedagogical framework and opportunities to apply students' strengths through active feedback.
Thank you to our judges!
Our expert judges are Lorna Davis, Dan Rosensweig, and Stuart Yasgur.
Lorna Davis is the Senior Advisor to Danone CEO and is a Global Ambassador for the B Corp movement. Lorna has now joined B-Lab, the non-for-profit that supports the B Corporation movement on an assignment to support the journey of large multi nationals on the path to using business as a force of good.
Dan Rosensweig joined Chegg in 2010 with a vision for transforming the popular textbook rental service into a leading provider of digital learning services for high school and college students. As Chairman and CEO of Chegg, Dan commits the company to fulfilling its mission of putting students first and helping them save time, save money and get smarter.
Stuart Yasgur leads Ashoka's Social Financial Services globally. At Ashoka, Stuart works with others to initiate efforts that have mobilized more than $500 million in funding for social entrepreneurs, engaged the G20 through the Toronto, Seoul and Los Cabos summits and helped form partnerships with leading financial institutions and corporations.
Again, thank you to our incredible expert judges.
