Awareness Reduces Racial Bias

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 7945 February 2014 ABSTRACT Awareness Reduces Racial BiasCan raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we confirm that racial bias persisted in the years after the study's original sample, but prior to the media coverage. Subsequent to the media coverage though, the bias completely disappeared. We examine potential mechanisms that may have produced this result and find that the most likely explanation is that upon becoming aware of their biases, individual referees changed their decision-making process. These results suggest that raising awareness of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change.JEL Classification: J15, J7, L83, K31

Persuaded Under Pressure: Evidence From the National Football League

“…However, this is difficult in sport given the public nature in which all participants, in particular the referees, operate. Given that referees have shown a willingness to adapt their behavior when made aware of their biases (Pope, Price, and Wolfers 2013), one solution may simply be to make the league aware of this behavior. Ultimately, however, unless team personnel are removed from direct contact with the run of play, it may be impossible to remove a sideline bias from the NFL.…”

“…Other social pressures on referees, including whether or not the contest is on television (Lane et al 2006), and the choice to make fewer calls at game's end so as to avoid being part of a game's narrative (Moskowitz and Wertheim 2011;Snyder and Lopez 2015), have also been suggested. And although their behavior is susceptible to outside factors, the monitoring of referees has been shown to reduce bias (Parsons et al 2011;Pope, Price, and Wolfers 2013). One aspect missing in the literature, but a part of the flow of any athletic event, is accounting for the pressure and monitoring applied on referees by team employees.…”

Race, Gender and Beauty: The Effect of Information Provision on Online Hiring Biases

“…This explanation is based on the notion that awareness can reduce one's subconscious biases. Racial bias in professional basketball referees persisted even after a study showed such bias [26], but disappeared after extensive media coverage of that study, suggesting that awareness reduced such bias [24]. Making crowdworkers aware of their own biases reduced their own biases [14], and academic promotion committees in scientific fields do not promote more men over women when they believe that gender bias exists [28].…”

Machine Learning and the Rule of Law

“…The first goal would be to expose judges to findings concerning the effects of legally relevant and legally irrelevant factors on decisions, with the goal of general rather than specific debiasing. For example, Pope, Price, and Wolfers (2013) found that awareness of racial bias among NBA referees subsequently reduced that bias. The second goal would be to educate legal decision makers in the tools of data analysis, so that they can become better consumers of this information when it is present during legal proceedings, and to more generally provide a set of thinking tools for understanding inference, prediction, and the conscious and unconscious factors that may influence their decision making.…”