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The impact of socioeconomic and phenotypic traits on self-perception of ethnicity in Latin America - PubMed

  • ️Fri Jan 01 2021

The impact of socioeconomic and phenotypic traits on self-perception of ethnicity in Latin America

Carolina Paschetta et al. Sci Rep. 2021.

Abstract

Self-perception of ethnicity is a complex social trait shaped by both, biological and non-biological factors. We developed a comprehensive analysis of ethnic self-perception (ESP) on a large sample of Latin American mestizos from five countries, differing in age, socio-economic and education context, external phenotypic attributes and genetic background. We measured the correlation of ESP against genomic ancestry, and the influence of physical appearance, socio-economic context, and education on the distortion observed between both. Here we show that genomic ancestry is correlated to aspects of physical appearance, which in turn affect the individual ethnic self-perceived ancestry. Also, we observe that, besides the significant correlation among genomic ancestry and ESP, specific physical or socio-economic attributes have a strong impact on self-perception. In addition, the distortion among ESP and genomic ancestry differs across age ranks/countries, probably suggesting the underlying effect of past public policies regarding identity. Our results indicate that individuals' own ideas about its origins should be taken with caution, especially in aspects of modern life, including access to work, social policies, and public health key decisions such as drug administration, therapy design, and clinical trials, among others.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Vertical histograms (pyramid plots) showing the distribution of Delta (Δ) between ESP and genomic ancestry (y-axis) and birth decade (y-axis) separately for ancestry and country. If the percentage of genomic ancestry falls within a given ESP interval, then we considered the case as zero bias. If the bias is positive means that ESP exceeds the genomic estimate, whereas a negative result indicates that ESP is lower than its genomic counterpart. Birth decade in black show significant result to Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Modal distribution of individuals for the ESP (y-axis) versus genomic ancestry (x-axis) separately for each country and ancestry. The fine grained distribution of individual on the ESP versus genomic ancestry space for each country/ancestry segmentation of the sample. Every point represent a value of an individual.

Figure 3
Figure 3

MFA results for the pooled sample (all countries). (A) The first two dimensions of the MFA showing simultaneously the global average (black dots) for each ESP category (AF: Africans, AM: Amerindians, EU: Europeans, and ME: mestizos), and the variation among them according to each block of variables (quantitative variables or quanti_PHEN; qualitative variables or quali_PHEN; wealth variables; education variables). Global average (black dots) are joined to their corresponding partial points, depicting the influence of each set of variables (e.g. colored dots or partial points denote the position of each individual seen only by a given group of variables). (B, C) Plot of MFA’s coordinates of the qualitative phenotypic (B) and sociocultural (C) categories as listed in Supp. Table S3. (D, E) Correlation and Contribution values of all individual variables to the MFA’s first (D) and second (E) dimensions.

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