From the New York Times news section:

How White Nationalists See What They Want to See in DNA Tests

What happens when white supremacists on the hate site Stormfront learn that they’re not as white as they thought? Two researchers investigated.

By Heather Murphy

July 12, 2019

On the hate site Stormfront, one of the largest online discussion forums dedicated to “white pride,” sharing DNA results with fellow members has become a rite of passage for some members.

But what happens when users’ results show that they fail to meet their own genetic criteria for whiteness? Are they still willing to post them? And if so, how do other users respond?

Such questions have long intrigued the sociologists Aaron Panofsky, who studies the social implications of genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Joan Donovan, whose research at Harvard University focuses on how information is manipulated on the internet.

“We had a puzzle,” Dr. Panofsky said in an interview this week. “If Stormfront says, ‘You’ve got to be all white or we’ll kick you out,’ how do they deal with these anomalies?”

Their findings, outlined this month in a study in the journal Social Studies of Science, show that yes, even members who fail to meet their own genetic standards will sometimes share the results.

In response, their fellow white nationalists tend to console them by offering potential reasons the results can’t be trusted. Among them: skepticism about the tests’ interpretations of the science or statistics, conspiracy theories about Jewish-owned genetic testing companies’ multicultural agendas, and reminders about alternative ways of measuring whiteness.

To Dr. Panofsky and Dr. Donovan, that meant trying to counter hate by getting white nationalists to consider that they actually are the people they hate was not going to work: Members of such groups are too determined to help each other see what they want to see.

The findings add to an already robust body of scholarship that shows how difficult it is to get people to alter pre-existing views, said Jonathan Baron, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study. “People go to extraordinary lengths to maintain beliefs to which they are committed,” he said.

“Science cannot save us,” Dr. Panofsky said, noting that in the years since he first began working on this study, genetic tests have increasingly been used to encourage the “mainstreamification” of white nationalism. “The political problem of white nationalism needs to be confronted on the level of values and law enforcement,” he said.

What Dr. Mercier, who was not involved in the study, found even more fascinating than users’ tendency to see what they wanted was that more than 50 people chose to disclose DNA results that contradicted their desired identity.