Discriminatory Attitudes between Ridesharing Passengers

TitleDiscriminatory Attitudes between Ridesharing Passengers
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2019
AuthorsScott Middleton, Jinhua Zhao
JournalTransportation
Keywordsclass, discrimination, race, ridesharing, social dominance, Transportation Network Companies (TNCs)
Abstract

Prior studies have provided evidence of discrimination between drivers and passengers in the context of ridehailing. This paper extends prior research by investigating passenger-to-passenger discriminatory attitudes in the context of ridesharing. We conducted a survey of 1,110 TNC users in the US using Mechanical Turk, 76.5% of which have used UberPool or LyftLine, and estimated two structural equation models. The first model examines the influence of one’s demographic, social and economic characteristics on discriminatory attitudes toward fellow passengers in ridesharing, and how such influence varies by the targets of discrimination, i.e., race and class. The second model examines the influence of one's generic social dominance orientation on discriminatory attitudes in the ridesharing context. We find that discriminatory attitudes toward fellow passengers of differing class and race in the shared ride are positively correlated with respondents that are male or are women with children. A respondent's race does not have a significant effect on discriminatory attitudes, but white respondents that live in majority white counties are more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes with regard to race (no effect is observed regarding class preferences). The same is true of respondents that live in counties in which a larger share of the electorate voted for the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Conversely, higher-income respondents appear more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes regarding class, but no effect is observed regarding racial preferences. We also find that one's generic social dominance orientation strongly influences his/her discriminatory attitudes in ridesharing, supporting the claim that behavior in shared mobility platforms reflects long-standing social dominance attitudes. Further research is required to identify policy interventions that mitigate such attitudes in the context of ridesharing.

URLhttps://mobility.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Discriminatory%20Attitudes%20between%20Ridesharing%20Passengers.pdf
DOI10.1007/s11116-019-10020-y