Enhancing Pluralism by Understanding Systemic Biases

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores how stereotypes associated with race and gender contribute to systematically biased decision-making processes. Both formal models and experiments contribute new understandings of how discriminatory outcomes occur, and what types of mechanisms could be at work in causing these outcomes. We discuss two experiments which analyze subjects’ decision-making, one in a judicial context in which judges are white or Black, and one in a public context involving responses to requests for help made by ostensibly white or Black subjects. Both of these experiments offer evidence regarding the routine interactions of members of different ethnic groups. McConnaughy, Tucker, and White’s paper analyzes how perceptions associated with ethnic identity lead subjects to either trust or distrust elites independently of whether their conduct corroborates this degree of confidence. Block, Crabtree, Holbein, and Monson’s large-scale experiment involving 250,000 individuals drawn from voter registration records provides direct evidence of discrimination routinely encountered by Black individuals within US society. Two other papers use formal models to elucidate how stereotypes, which could be ethnic or gender-based, can support systemic discrimination. Chwe’s paper uses a formal model to examine how the need for societies to coordinate enforces the typing of individuals according to a coarser set of features that can reduce to simply “male” and “female” attributes. This then results in binary typing in which identifying features, such as footwear choice or eye glasses, communicate group membership which can in turn serve the function of facilitating coordination. Amadae’s paper also uses a formal model which shows that (a) given the ability to apply a binary recognition scheme along the lines of ethnic typing or gender typing; and (b) given that such a binary scheme assists in achieving social coordination; (c) we should expect systemic discrimination to be the norm and not the exception. This paper explores when conditions are conducive to either minority or majority domination. The aim of this research is to assist us in developing pluralistic communities and institutions without discriminatory practices.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• Race and Judgment in Choice of Representatives - Corrine M. McConnaughy, Princeton University; Tina Tucker, Duke University; Ismail K. White, Princeton University

• Race, Representation, and Mundane Anti-Black Discrimination in the United States - Ray Block, Penn State University; Charles David Crabtree, Dartmouth College; John Holbein, University of Virginia; Quin Monson, Brigham Young University

• Coordination Causes Coarse Concepts - Michael Chwe, UCLA

• How Pressures to Coordinate Can Foster Systemic Discrimination - Sonja M. Amadae, University of Helsinki

Chair

• Sonja M. Amadae University of Helsinki

Discussant

• Jared Clemons Duke University