If you turn away someone upon seeing their face, without finding out their credit score, you are not turning them away because of their credit score.
HUD tests this. They send a white person and a black/Hispanic/Asian person to the same rental agent. Both present themselves as equally qualified. On average, the white person is shown more rental units.
The situation is worse (on average) for potential homebuyers. White potential buyers are told about, and shown, a LOT more houses for sale than equally qualified black or Asian buyers.
Aah, that was the study I was looking for, @ucbalumnus. It’s interesting that they only used male names. I wonder if it would have been diffferent with female names.
No, that’s not it. There’s just not much evidence a criminal record mattered for the particular subset of jobs used in the online applications. For example, HS black women were more likely to get a favorable response if they had a criminal record than if they didn’t in the online applications.
@roethlisburger, which study are you talking about? In the study I was looking at, having a criminal record didn’t seem to matter much for women but it mattered a lot for men. (Look at page 52)
There are other psychological tests that claim to measure bias. There is the Modern Racism Scale for one.
There are also many forms of IAT, testing for things such as age, gender, weigh, aggression etc.
The authors also claim that by not believing in implicit bias, one is committing a fallacy of a sort. I strongly disagree. The onus is not on a layperson to prove implicit bias does not exist, but for the proponents to prove that it does.
If you turn someone down because of their race, that is illegal. But if that person does not have the credit score you require, then it’s perfectly legal to turn them down. I would think that most landlords would know if he law well enough that they aren’t just seeing someone’s skin color and telling them they can’t rent to them. We have turned down a number of people who have had poor credit, lied about their social security number and backgrounds. We have accepted some people of color with poor credit because they were honest with us, and turned down whites with decent credit who were dishonest.
@busdriver, we give you incontrovertible evidence that black people with good credit scores have more trouble renting than white people with the same credit score, and then you tell us this phenomenon does not exist. How, then, do you explain the evidence we are giving you? Are all these studies lying? Is HUD lying?
For just one out of hundreds of examples: Academic scientists rate resumes with women’s names on the top worse than the very same resumes with men’s names on top. When asked, the scientists (plausibly, in my view) say that they do not consciously rate women lower than men.
So what is your explanation here? The study was wrongly done? The scientists are lying; they’re not implicitly biased, but explicitly biased, but they won’t admit it? Because if the study was correctly done, and the scientists are telling the truth that they don’t intend to rate women worse than equally qualified men, then “implicit bias” is the name of the explanation. There is no other explanation. You have to believe the studies are wrongly done (small sample size, or poor randomization, or fraud, or something of the sort), or you have to believe the scientists were consciously, intentionally biased, or you have to believe they were biased but didn’t intend to be biased. There are no other explanations. Which is your pick, here? Bear in mind that this one study is just one of many exposing implicit bias.
Ok, but @CardinalFang is not talking about POC with poor credit scores getting turned down. She is talking about studies which show that people with excellent scores but non-white sounding names are turned down at a higher rate than people with “white sounding names” with similar scores.
Seems she was talking about a couple of different things. First she claimed that landlords were turning away people with black faces. And then she linked a study that demonstrated minorities were showed less properties and told about less properties available, by realtors and property managers.
Which is most definitely not, “Landlords turning away people with black faces”. And then she says:
To which I respond, I don’t think these studies are lies. But I think you linked the wrong study to prove that, “Landlords are turning away people with black faces”. There is nothing in that study that proves anything about landlords.
The HUD study showed that realtors and property owners showed/told about fewer properties if the prospective client was black, compared to an equally qualified person. How is that not turning someone away (from the properties that were not revealed) because the person is black?
And then we have this result, in Richmond, California (near Oakland), where the paired testing used phoning, using people whose voices sounded African-American or white. It was a small test, but the people with African American sounding voices got clearly worse treatment in more than half the probes: they were told higher income requirements; or the white people were told there was no income requirement while the African American was told of an income requirement; or the white person was told about other available units but the black person wasn’t;or the agent cut off the black person, but continued the conversation with the white person via text.
But if you want to hear about people being turned away because of a black FACE instead of a black NAME or a black VOICE (as if that’s somehow worse) that hasn’t disappeared either:
No. The HUD study indicated that realtors and property managers showed less properties to minorities. That shows bias, but I don’t know that it’s illegal. Landlords refusing to rent to minorities is illegal. The last article you linked showed two cases where it was clearly illegal, and HUD followed up on the charge.
I don’t know if you’re getting my point. It is inaccurate to claim one thing, and then follow it up with a study about something else. Yes, it’s related, but not the same as your last example, with people showing up with a non-white face and the landlords refusing to rent to them.
I don’t know whether showing fewer properties to black people is illegal, but I’ve been arguing for the existence of bias among landlords, and now you agree it exists. I’m pretty sure having different income requirements for black people is illegal.
If landlords won’t even show an available property to a black person, or tell them of its existence, then they clearly are not going to rent that available property to the black person.
I forgot this one before, but the case of orchestra auditions is one of the clearest, most undeniable cases of implicit bias. To review, it used to be that top orchestras would audition musician so that the evaluators could see the musician. Almost no women were hired. Evaluators denied any bias, and claimed that women just weren’t good enough.
Then, in response to claims of bias, orchestras began auditioning the musicians behind a screen. But this audition method was not adopted at the same time by all orchestras; it’s a natural experiment.
Lo and behold, when an orchestra couldn’t see whether the musician was male or female, suddenly women musicians began to be hired. The orchestras had said they weren’t biased against women, and no doubt believed they weren’t biased against women, but in fact, they were. This is the art and essence of implicit bias.
If I remember some of the studies on the orchestra auditions, @“Cardinal Fang” , there was still a notable bias even after the screens went up, if the musician walked in and sat down behind the screen while the evaluators were listening.
It turned out that the evaluators could unconsciously determine it was a woman based upon the sound of her high heels when she walked in. Once that signal was removed, by having the musician be seated beforehand, the number of women musicians increased even further.
Bias, as it is commonly used, exist. Implicit bias as common usage also exist. As a scientific term it is simply not ready to be adopted. Running workshops on a half-baked concept is even more silly. Not seeing any behaviour change? Why should I be surprised? This article expresses my skepticism better than I can:
I’m not understanding what you’re doubting, here. Implicit bias exists. You acknowledge it exists. So then why should scientists not use the term “implicit bias” to describe implicit bias, the phenomenon we both agree exists? We can talk about how to measure it, but this phenomenon exists and has a name.
The study we’re discussing used two measures to rate the amount of bias that black people face in a particular area: the Implicit Association Test, and Google searches for racist terms. Both of these measures correlated with each other and with black boys having worse outcomes. You’re saying we shouldn’t believe these results because…?