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Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as

Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social status. So while I don't fault the study here, it's not clear that this really demonstrates what the title says ("shows bias in hiring"). It shows bias if you tell a hiring manager they need to make a hiring decision based on no actual interviewing. It'd be like if a candidate came in for an interview, made 60 seconds of small talk, and then the hiring manager had to immediately make an offer. And, yeah, I'm not surprised that in a situation like that, hiring managers make decisions based on the slimmest of signals, amplifying class-based biases. Would they have way less bias if given any real signal about a candidate's fitness for a job? That's not shown one way or another according to this press release. That said, I generally do believe the thesis here (that speech patterns influence class perceptions which significantly bias hiring), even if I'm not convinced that this particular study shows that.

beaner 5y ago
Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering. It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason? Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's background, employer's were left to use the signals they could pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The solution was to allow background checks again. It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway. So it's not testing for anything real. (Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)
- deleted 5y ago
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- mavelikara 5y ago
  > So it's not testing for anything real. You are too quick to dismiss the study, I think. What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job. The study simulates the other things being equal scenario by eliminating all other avenues for the hiring manager to judge. Here is the quote from the TFA, lightly edited for emphasis: The study, ... , demonstrates that: (a) people can accurately assess a stranger’s socioeconomic position — defined by their income, education, and occupation status — based on brief speech patterns and (b) shows that these snap perceptions influence hiring managers in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes. > The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Agree, but ALSO be aware of such biases and try prevent those.
  - jdgoesmarching 5y ago
    This is how research works, you isolate variables. By OP’s logic science is never testing for anything “real.” I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy, but this is kinda silly.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      Isolating this variable allows one to study how good hiring managers are at estimating base probabilities for education/competence given social class (news alert: they are not independent). It says nothing about what actually matters: do hiring managers with the ability to properly interview "equally qualified" candidates from different social backgrounds do so effectively (i.e. offer them similar compensation), or do they still rely on the base rates (i.e. bias), and how big is that effect?
    - jefftk 5y ago
      But this is also not how isolating variables works. If you give someone no information, and require them to make a decision based only on speech patterns, that does not actually tell you very much about how they would make a decision if they had lots of information including speech patterns. Compare: a) only speech b) lots of complex skills-based information that is (verified in a separate experiment) equivalent on balance, plus also speech It's quite possible that you could see a large difference in decisions in (a) without any detectable difference in (b). For example, imagine in this study hiring managers are (perhaps subconsciously) estimating education level from speech. If they already have lots of details about candidate's education, that "screens out" the rough proxy of their speech patterns.
deleted 5y ago
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rossdavidh 5y ago
Wow I was about to make this more or less exact comment before I read yours. Including, by the way, that last sentence.
kristopolous 5y ago
It's wild how people with different assumptions about the world can read the same thing, focus on the same part, and walk away with opposite conclusions. I read that as them trying to control for other factors and get a clean signal to demonstrate their hypothesis as a testable, verifiable, and falsifiable phenomenon. But some people apparently think that the process of isolation IS the confounding factor that produces the results. This makes things difficult. If they don't do this people will accuse them of not controlling for everything but when they do do it then they say "well yeah, you're controlling for everything else, of course you'll get that". The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome
- tomp 5y ago
  It’s simply invalid science. It’s equivalent to having variables x, y, z, setting x = 0 and then exploring the correlation between y and z. That’s a fair experiment, but you simply cannot generalise the conclusion outside of the tested range for x (i.e. for x != 0).
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    No it's not. It's like having x and claiming y and z might exist. You set it equal to zero and then you demonstrate the existence of the others. Every study I've ever seen dealing with messy social sciences has some kind of fundamental counternarrative. That's why there's follow-up studies to try to demonstrate things in different ways. Take the Milgram experiment. Some participants have claimed they knew the machine was fake but didn't want to mess up the experiment so they played along. Do we throw that out then? Everything real is complex, we aren't dealing with carefully defined clean room abstractions. The Asch conformity test with the lines, many participants expressed extreme indifference to the arbitrary exercise after the confederates disagreed. They simply did whatever was required to complete the experiment. Do we toss that out? All experiments are like this. Every single one. That's why you have to do multiple different kinds and have a preponderance of evidence from a diversity of approaches. That's the whole point The opposite baseline belief, that mannerisms, poise and confidence have absolutely nothing to do with class signalling and that class absolutely does not reproduce itself through social institutions, seems to me to be the more implausible hypothesis here. There'd have to be some new hypothesis to explain why it so clearly looks like going to Eton or Harvard and growing up in the Hamptons affords one preferences in the job market even when the prospect employer doesn't know such details. Personally I think that's the one that should be on the defensive. A confounding factor there is the one that needs demonstration.
tgv 5y ago
It's quite common to infer social status from speech. Since the level of education used to correlate with social status, it made sense to have a preference. If that correlation still holds is hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised.
candybar 5y ago
It's worse than that - the hiring managers were accurately identifying things that matter. The article isn't saying that the hiring managers were unfairly biased, but that they were somehow able to pick up on traits (their level of education, their level of professional success) that they'd otherwise care about. It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found. To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.

beaner 5y ago

Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering. It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason? Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's background, employer's were left to use the signals they could pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The solution was to allow background checks again. It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway. So it's not testing for anything real. (Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mavelikara 5y ago
> So it's not testing for anything real. You are too quick to dismiss the study, I think. What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job. The study simulates the other things being equal scenario by eliminating all other avenues for the hiring manager to judge. Here is the quote from the TFA, lightly edited for emphasis: The study, ... , demonstrates that: (a) people can accurately assess a stranger’s socioeconomic position — defined by their income, education, and occupation status — based on brief speech patterns and (b) shows that these snap perceptions influence hiring managers in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes. > The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Agree, but ALSO be aware of such biases and try prevent those.
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  This is how research works, you isolate variables. By OP’s logic science is never testing for anything “real.” I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy, but this is kinda silly.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    Isolating this variable allows one to study how good hiring managers are at estimating base probabilities for education/competence given social class (news alert: they are not independent). It says nothing about what actually matters: do hiring managers with the ability to properly interview "equally qualified" candidates from different social backgrounds do so effectively (i.e. offer them similar compensation), or do they still rely on the base rates (i.e. bias), and how big is that effect?
  - jefftk 5y ago
    But this is also not how isolating variables works. If you give someone no information, and require them to make a decision based only on speech patterns, that does not actually tell you very much about how they would make a decision if they had lots of information including speech patterns. Compare: a) only speech b) lots of complex skills-based information that is (verified in a separate experiment) equivalent on balance, plus also speech It's quite possible that you could see a large difference in decisions in (a) without any detectable difference in (b). For example, imagine in this study hiring managers are (perhaps subconsciously) estimating education level from speech. If they already have lots of details about candidate's education, that "screens out" the rough proxy of their speech patterns.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rossdavidh 5y ago

Wow I was about to make this more or less exact comment before I read yours. Including, by the way, that last sentence.

kristopolous 5y ago

It's wild how people with different assumptions about the world can read the same thing, focus on the same part, and walk away with opposite conclusions. I read that as them trying to control for other factors and get a clean signal to demonstrate their hypothesis as a testable, verifiable, and falsifiable phenomenon. But some people apparently think that the process of isolation IS the confounding factor that produces the results. This makes things difficult. If they don't do this people will accuse them of not controlling for everything but when they do do it then they say "well yeah, you're controlling for everything else, of course you'll get that". The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome

tomp 5y ago
It’s simply invalid science. It’s equivalent to having variables x, y, z, setting x = 0 and then exploring the correlation between y and z. That’s a fair experiment, but you simply cannot generalise the conclusion outside of the tested range for x (i.e. for x != 0).
- kristopolous 5y ago
  No it's not. It's like having x and claiming y and z might exist. You set it equal to zero and then you demonstrate the existence of the others. Every study I've ever seen dealing with messy social sciences has some kind of fundamental counternarrative. That's why there's follow-up studies to try to demonstrate things in different ways. Take the Milgram experiment. Some participants have claimed they knew the machine was fake but didn't want to mess up the experiment so they played along. Do we throw that out then? Everything real is complex, we aren't dealing with carefully defined clean room abstractions. The Asch conformity test with the lines, many participants expressed extreme indifference to the arbitrary exercise after the confederates disagreed. They simply did whatever was required to complete the experiment. Do we toss that out? All experiments are like this. Every single one. That's why you have to do multiple different kinds and have a preponderance of evidence from a diversity of approaches. That's the whole point The opposite baseline belief, that mannerisms, poise and confidence have absolutely nothing to do with class signalling and that class absolutely does not reproduce itself through social institutions, seems to me to be the more implausible hypothesis here. There'd have to be some new hypothesis to explain why it so clearly looks like going to Eton or Harvard and growing up in the Hamptons affords one preferences in the job market even when the prospect employer doesn't know such details. Personally I think that's the one that should be on the defensive. A confounding factor there is the one that needs demonstration.

tgv 5y ago

It's quite common to infer social status from speech. Since the level of education used to correlate with social status, it made sense to have a preference. If that correlation still holds is hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised.

candybar 5y ago

It's worse than that - the hiring managers were accurately identifying things that matter. The article isn't saying that the hiring managers were unfairly biased, but that they were somehow able to pick up on traits (their level of education, their level of professional success) that they'd otherwise care about. It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found. To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.