Eric Muller of Is That Legal has an interesting post up about social science research that highlights internal biases based on race and gender. He reports:
[In one] experiment, subjects had an email exchange with somebody they thought was a Harvard student, but was actually the researcher. At some point in the exchange, the researcher mentioned her SAT scores. Some of the subjects were corresponding with a person whose email address was “chen@harvard.edu,” some were corresponding with a person whose email address was “Amy@harvard.edu,” and some were corresponding with a person whose email address was “ac@harvard.edu.” After the exchange, subjects were asked to recall their correspondent’s SAT scores. Those who were corresponding with the email address that implied Asian ancestry (“chen@harvard.edu”) remembered that their correspondent scored higher on the math test than the verbal test. And those who were corresponding with the email address that implied their correspondent was female (“Amy@harvard.edu”) remembered that their correspondent scored higher in verbal than in math.
Read the post.
