Awareness Reduces Racial Bias

Can 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 disappeared. Several potential mechanisms may have produced this result, including voluntary behavior changes by individual referees, adjustments by players to new information, and changes in referee behavior due to institutional pressure. These results suggest a new kind of Hawthorne effect in which greater scrutiny of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change. Keywords: behavioral economics * racial discrimination
1. Introduction A recent stream of research has documented the existence of in-group racial biases in the employment, criminal, judicial, and educational settings (Donohue and Levitt 2001, Bertrand et al. [...]