Economic Trade-Off Benchmarking of Identity Bias
RCTReview
Standard survey measurements of social prejudice suffer from social desirability bias and fail to quantify the real-world economic efficiency costs individuals are willing to incur to discriminate against minority groups.
Picture this
Imagine shopping at a market where choosing a cashier from a group you dislike costs you half your grocery bag. If customers willingly leave empty-handed just to avoid that cashier, they are putting an exact dollar price on their prejudice. Measuring how much value people sacrifice reveals the true strength of their hidden bias.
What the evidence says
Control group participants were willing to forgo grocery items worth nearly twice the median daily per capita food expenditure to avoid hiring a transgender worker; participating in 3-person group discussions reduced this willingness to sacrifice grocery items to zero on average.
- Who was studied
- 3,397 non-transgender individuals in urban Chennai, India.
- How
- Randomized experiment using 10 private binary hiring choices where choosing between cisgender and transgender workers required participants to sacrifice varying quantities of real grocery delivery items.
What to do
Design incentivized choice experiments that force decision-makers to choose between prejudiced preferences and explicit material payoffs to quantify the economic magnitude of identity bias.
From the source
"Participants in the comparison group were willing to forgo items worth nearly twice the median daily per capita food expenditure whereas those in the 3-person discussion arm (group one) were not willing to sacrifice any items, on average."
Effects_of_Group_Discussion_on_Hiring_Decisions_Involving_Transgender.pdf