Pride and Prejudice

Imagine having to assess a stack of applications to fill an executive post in a large company. Apart from education, intelligence and experience, research suggests that socially-sensitive attributes such as weight, appearance and race, significantly come into play.

Eugene Caruso of the Chicago School of Business uses a method called conjoint analysis in proving that they do (market researchers use this method in approximating the added costs consumers are willing to pay for products with certain attributes). His research demonstrates that despite what we say, our actions tell a different story on our tendency to discriminate based on some socially-sensitive trait.

A relatively recent article appearing in the Journal of Political Economy by Kerwin Kofi Charles from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and Jonathan Guryan from Chicago School of Business, estimates that about a quarter of the racial wage gap comes from discrimination. Marianne Bertrand of the Chicago School of Business and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University also show that resumes with stereotypic white names get more interviews than those with black sounding ones.

All this makes the election of America’s first black president rather astounding. During the primaries it became apparent how his opponents were willing to exploit social prejudice by using his foreign sounding middle name and mixed racial ancestry against him. He weathered through these attacks and succeeded not by positioning himself as a candidate with an agenda for advancing the interests of the black community, but as a vehicle for bridging the American cultural divide.

On Australia Day 2009, reconciliation took a step further when, following an official apology to descendants of the stolen generation, when the honour of Australian of the Year went for the first time to an indigenous leader Mick Dodson.

Given that researchers can detect racial discrimination, and that it seems to evade our own conscious efforts, that despite these symbolic milestones, human societies have yet to get over the biases that have been transmitted down from previous generations.