Economic Trade-Off Benchmarking of Identity Bias

In Simple Words

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.

Research question

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.

Participants

3,397 non-transgender individuals in urban Chennai, India.

Study Design

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.

Results

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.

Takeaway

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.

Read alongside the research

Plain-English glossary

Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.

Median

The middle number after arranging the values from smallest to largest. If there are two middle numbers, use their average.

ExampleFor the values 2, 4 and 12, the middle value is 4. The median is 4.

NIST · Measures of location ↗Read more about median →

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