Trial reportPloS one2020
Do genetic ancestry tests increase racial essentialism? Findings from a randomized controlled trial.
Trial report in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Examining relationships between multifactorial health beliefs and beliefs about the social implications of genetics.Journal of health psychology · 2026Article
- Integrating genetic ancestry into clinical care: Accuracy, utility, and stakeholder views.Journal of community genetics · 2026Article
- Article
- Guidelines for genetic ancestry inference created through roundtable discussions.HGG advances · 2023Article
- Getting it right: Teaching undergraduate biology to undermine racial essentialism.Biology methods & protocols · 2023Article
- Recommendations on the use and reporting of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in genetic research: Experiences from the NHLBI TOPMed program.Cell genomics · 2022Article
- Ending genetic essentialism through genetics education.HGG advances · 2022Review
- The Articulation of Genomics, Mestizaje, and Indigenous Identities in Chile: A Case Study of the Social Implications of Genomic Research in Light of Current Research Practices.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Taking an antiracist posture in scientific publications in human genetics and genomics.Genetics in medicine : official journal of the American College of Medical Genetics · 2021Article
- A variant-centric perspective on geographic patterns of human allele frequency variation.eLife · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Genetic ancestry testing is a billion-dollar industry, with more than 26 million tests sold by 2018, which raises concerns over how it might influence test-takers' understandings of race. While social scientists argue that genetic ancestry tests may promote an essentialist view of race as fixed and determining innate abilities, others suggest it could reduce essentialist views by reinforcing a view of race as socially constructed. Essentialist views are a concern because of their association with racism, particularly in its most extreme forms. Here we report the first randomized controlled trial of genetic ancestry testing conducted to examine potential causal relationships between taking the tests and essentialist views of race. Native-born White Americans were randomly assigned to receive Admixture and mtDNA tests or no tests. While we find no significant average effect of genetic ancestry testing on essentialism, secondary analyses reveal that the impact of these tests on racial essentialism varies by type of genetic knowledge. Within the treatment arm, essentialist beliefs significantly declined after testing among individuals with high genetic knowledge, but increased among those with the least genetic knowledge. Additional secondary analysis show that essentialist beliefs do not change based on the specific ancestries reported in test-takers' results. These results indicate that individuals' interpretations of genetic ancestry testing results, and the links between genes and race, may depend on their understanding of genetics.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.