Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions
JAN. 3, 2015
By SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN
The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that r****m is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.
Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers. As it turns out, an impressive body of research spanning decades addresses just these issues — and leads to some uncomfortable conclusions and makes us look at this debate from a different angle.
The central challenge of such research is isolating the effect of race from other factors. For example, we know African-Americans earn less income, on average, than w****s. Maybe that is evidence that employers discriminate against them. But maybe not. We also know African-Americans tend to be stuck in neighborhoods with worse schools, and perhaps that — and not race directly — explains the wage gap. If so, perhaps policy should focus on place rather than race, as some argue.
But we can isolate the effect of race to some degree. A study I conducted in 2003 with Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, illustrates how. We mailed thousands of résumés to employers with job openings and measured which ones were selected for callbacks for interviews. But before sending them, we randomly used stereotypically African-American names (such as “Jamal”) on some and stereotypically white names (like “Brendan”) on others.
The same résumé was roughly 50 percent more likely to result in callback for an interview if it had a “white” name. Because the résumés were statistically identical, any differences in outcomes could be attributed only to the factor we manipulated: the names.
Other studies have also examined race and employment. In a 2009 study, Devah Pager, Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski, all now sociologists at Harvard, sent actual people to apply for low-wage jobs. They were given identical résumés and similar interview training. Their sobering finding was that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.
These kinds of methods have been used in a variety of research, especially in the last 20 years. Here are just some of the general findings:
■ When doctors were shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients — even when their medical files were statistically identical to those of white patients.
■ When w****s and b****s were sent to bargain for a used car, b****s were offered initial prices roughly $700 higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
■ Several studies found that sending emails with stereotypically black names in response to apartment-rental ads on Craigslist elicited fewer responses than sending ones with white names. A regularly repeated study by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development sent African-Americans and w****s to look at apartments and found that African-Americans were shown fewer apartments to rent and houses for sale.
■ White state legislators were found to be less likely to respond to constituents with African-American names. This was true of legislators in both political parties.
■ Emails sent to faculty members at universities, asking to talk about research opportunities, were more likely to get a reply if a stereotypically white name was used.
■ Even eBay auctions were not immune. When iPods were auctioned on eBay, researchers randomly varied the skin color on the hand holding the iPod. A white hand holding the iPod received 21 percent more offers than a black hand.
The criminal justice system — the focus of current debates — is harder to examine this way. One study, though, found a clever method. The pools of people from which jurors are chosen are effectively random. Analyzing this natural experiment revealed that an all-white jury was 16 percentage points more likely to convict a black defendant than a white one, but when a jury had one black member, it convicted both at the same rate.
I could go on, but hopefully the sheer breadth of these findings impresses you, as it did me.
There are some counterexamples: Data show that some places, like elite colleges, most likely do favor minority applicants. But this evidence underlies that a helping hand in one area does not preclude harmful shoves in many other areas, including ignored résumés, unhelpful faculty members and reluctant landlords.

I'd be ashamed to tell people I am a social scientist and then print some garbage like this. B****s are in the condition they are in because of b****s! B****s made the choice to sit at home generation after generation and drink Colt 45 while collecting welfare. B****s make the decision to r**t and burn down cities when cops are FORCED into shooting and k*****g a thug criminal. B****s have the same opportunity as anyone else does in this Country. All they have to do is work for it just like everyone else does! I'm so s**k of you race baiting fools never accepting any responsibility and placing the blame entirely on white people. The white man has held down the black man...it gets old! S***ery was abolished in 1865 and the highest office in the USA is held by a black man (Obama). Many of the most powerful offices in DC are held by black men (Eric Holder). Black men advise our black president (Al Sharpton) AND dozens of black staffers who have managed to get themselves into well paying positions walked out on Capital Hill in protest with their hands up saying: "Don't shoot, Hands Up" It just goes to show the pure ignorance of these people when a Grand Jury, presented with facts, scientific evidence, and coroners reports refuted all the lies repeated by the Ferguson crowd, YET somehow these people still see an injustice...INCREDIBLE!!! I guess Officer Darren Wilson was supposed to simply lay down his life, and allow this THUG CRIMINAL to take his gun and blow his head off his shoulders! That's exactly what b****s want. The blood of an innocent WHITE man who was simply doing his job.

Who in the hell wants to promote a pack of thugs, r****rs, thieves and car jackers? Anyone want the rapist, shop lifters, multiple babies born from CRACK Moma's and NO Daddies in sight? America should simply PURGE all these azzholes from our soil, and for those that are BLACK and that want to cling to the "poor ol me been a s***e" crap, ship their sorry azz back to Afrika, and let them live as most other Afrikans do, k*****g each other off as they currently do there and have been for centuries. They get NO sympathy from me and I hope, the rest of the SANE majority of Americans of whom are sick and tired of their s**t.