If you want to watch somebody running on pure instinct, find a pro basketball referee. There's no time for premeditation. Stand in the middle of a screaming crowd and ten really big guys are moving really fast and suddenly one of them's on the floor: make the call now.
The ref is a great subject for an unconscious bias study, thought Justin Wolfers of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student. They must have skipped a lot of real basketball games to collate "all boxscore information from all regular season NBA games played from the 1991-92 season through to the 2003-04 season, yielding over a quarter of a million player-game observations," working to eliminate every variable except race.
Race matters
Their results are reported in yesterday's New York Times, which has a link (bless you, New York Times) to the full paper. The referees gave better calls to players of their own race:
We find that players earn up to 4% fewer fouls and score up to 2½% more points on nights in which their race matches that of the refereeing crew. . . . The bias in foul-calling is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.
"[E]xplicit animus strikes us as quite unlikely," say Wolfers and Price, and they're right. It's not possible that NBA referees engineered a secret twelve-year conspiracy to slant their foul calls. The bias was unconscious; it skewed the decisions and the refs never knew it.
"A growing consensus"
The NBA disputes the results and is doing its own study. But scholars in the field aren't remotely surprised, since other research has confirmed unconscious bias again and again. Times writer Alan Schwarz ran the paper past three of them, including Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, "the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias":
“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”
Not just basketball
"While there are important limits to the external validity of extrapolating from our study of NBA referees," say Wolfers and Price in the paper, there are obvious analogies to other contexts:
For instance, just as referees have to evaluate whether or not a foul occurred, teachers must decide whether a student’s actions are deserving of disciplinary action, customers decide whether or not to trust proprietors, firms decide who to hire, fire or promote, judges decide who to sentence, and officers decide not only who to arrest, but also make split-second judgments as to whether a suspect is reaching for his gun, or his wallet. The stakes surrounding these decisions are high, and implicit associations may well guide actions beyond the basketball court.
We can add one more similarity: Jurors decide whom to believe, and who should win. Most jurors will make these decisions as sincerely and honestly as they possibly can. When race (or gender, or homosexuality, or any other bias) slants their view, they'll never tell you on voir dire -- because they don't know it themselves.
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Source note: Wolfers's and Price's paper has a good bibliography listing other research on unconscious bias.
(Photo by Doug L. at http://www.flickr.com/photos/77615975@N00/438155193/; license details there.)
