4 ms·

> 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. In an interview wher

> 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. In an interview where you're not allowed to evaluate "all other things". In other words, absent any other information, people believe those from a higher class are more likely to be competent. Is that true? The link says nothing about it. If it is true, the hiring managers did a good job at estimating average competence from social class based on their knowledge (i.e. "bias"). It does not show that in an interview process where you are allowed to evaluate the candidate on factors that matter for the job, higher class matters at all (i.e. given two equally qualified candidates that are interviewed by an experienced hiring manager, the higher class one gets better offers/evaluation of competence). And this is the bias that matters because it applies to the real world.

ErikVandeWater 6y ago
Exactly. It's not discrimination if it is objectively true.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  I would certainly want to see proof before I accepted it was true. And even if it were true, we might find it socially undesirable for people to act on (it's "objectively true" that hiring disabled people costs an employer money too). I have previously seen a similar study to this one where landlords were able to determine a prospective tenant's race in brief phone conversations and were less willing to rent to minority tenants. Was that also just sound, evidence based reasoning?
  - midjji 5y ago
    Few challenge that the children of highly educated parents have higher academic achievement. As highly educated parents is strongly correlated with upper class. This is enough to make it quite likely that someone from an upper class background will be the better candidate in expectation, even if the only information you get is the socioeconomic background. We can quibble over details, but the more you dig into this the more convincing this will become. It does not matter as you already believe this. With regards to minority tenants, institutionalized racism often leads to the case that non-racist agents will have sound evidence based reasons to discriminate. Not based on the properties of the group discriminated, but based on the behaviour of a third party. A decent example is if banks discriminate against a group, then their availability of credit is worse. This can create self perpetuating circles of discrimination, which can be sustained even if all involved organisations and individuals aren't racist. For a hilarious example of something similar, see: https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg This is a communication and organisational failure, not racism, but its difficult to distinguish, but critically yes, it means it could be. Non-discrimination and positive discrimination is best viewed as taxes designed to address this kind of problem, and its working. But the habit people have of challenging this kind of thing as a kneejerk reaction is harmful. What you are doing is essentially claiming that their judgements are corrupt or trying to shame by implied association, and that isn't helpful.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way. I would also challenge your notion. It is true that wealth is correlated with educational achievement. But educational achievement will not, in itself, lead to someone speaking in a way that is more patrician. Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position? It may even be the case that, assuming two people with the same education, the person from a lower class background is more likely to be exceptional.
      - pedrosorio 5y ago
        > Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position? No, that is why interviews should look more like the ones Google performs and less like "please describe yourself, hobbies and life experiences"
        emodendroket 5y ago
        Yes, I agree. For all the complaints, I think it is a much fairer system than the alternative.
      - midjji 5y ago
        !As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way.! With the way you put it now, the people living within such systems would be racists taking racist actions based on sound evidence based reasoning. The term itself is also problematic, as no institutions nor race need to be involved for this kind of problem to occur, its simply the most familiar form to americans. Inadequate equilibria is better, but the corresponding the problem xxx would disappear if people weren't idiots isn't productive either. Just like it is not necessary for the upper class to be more educated, its not necessary for the more educated to speak upper class. But it is more likely. That such would be enough to stagnate social mobility seems like pessimistic hyperbole to me. Given that we are talking about high value added, high paying, i.e. worker shortage jobs and that there are significantly more demand for such workers than the upper class could provide, meaning, even at worst, such behaviour could only slow down social mobility, not stop it. If the people who are evaluated are drawn randomly from the population as they claim to in the study, then no. If its a real hiering situation, then possibly yes, though it depends on how the position was advertised. That however may not even change the outcome of the study. In most big companies recruiters are not looking for the best applicant for the job, or atleast have no incentives to do so. They are looking for the easiest to motivate hiring for the job. Similarly, their boss may not have ordered them to find the best worker for the job, they likely asked for a good enough worker who causes minimum issues and who if they cause issues were easy to motivate having hired in the first place. Note that I never claimed that upper class speech meant better at the job, I explicitly wrote academic achievement, i.e the kind of thing which makes for an easily justified hire. Imagine having hired Dr House except without a degree, or a slightly below average doctor with an average grade degree. Now one is plain better, but the other will never get you fired. But thats a whole other problem.
HPsquared 6y ago
I wonder what the class breakdown would be if the hiring managers had access to all other relevant information about the candidates, EXCEPT socioeconomic class... I'd expect the more 'upper class' candidates probably would do better on average.
ingleswood 6y ago
Do you have a hypothetical explanation for why, if people are only allowed to evaluate speech and accent, they prefer a certain group, but if allowed to evaluate lots of different more meaningful things, which all lead to the same conclusion about competence EXCEPT for speech and accent, that preference no longer applies? That seems like an extraordinary claim unless you have some evidentiary base for it.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  Sure, it's very credible that a general tendency will remain if other sources of information are available. The unresolved question is what weight is assigned to each preference. If a hiring decision is influenced to 0.01% by speech and accent and 99.99% by whatever you deem reasonable criteria, then what do you learn from filtering out the latter? And of course, decisions like this need not have linear behavior in reality either. A gross mismatch between different indicators could result in significantly worse hiring manager opinions than the (weighted) sum of the individual aspects. Imagine that a candidate shows moderate (but sufficient) aptitude but then tries to disguise it with "high brow" rhetoric. In isolation using such speech may be considered a positive, but in this case it will be probably be to their detriment.
  - ingleswood 5y ago
    Isn't the existence in a more realistic hiring process of a huge weight of objective and reasonable criteria an unjustified, unlikely and politically subjective assumption? Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0.01% by speech and accent, 64.99% by other class, race and gender markers, and 35% by reasonable criteria such as competence? Why wouldn't this be your base case assumption?
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      > Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias No such thing was shown in this study. The study makes no attempt to measure E(skills | social class). For all we know, the hiring managers provided an unbiased (i.e. the opposite of "irrational bias") estimate of the expected skills conditioned on the social class of the applicant, absent any other information.

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

Exactly. It's not discrimination if it is objectively true.

emodendroket 6y ago
I would certainly want to see proof before I accepted it was true. And even if it were true, we might find it socially undesirable for people to act on (it's "objectively true" that hiring disabled people costs an employer money too). I have previously seen a similar study to this one where landlords were able to determine a prospective tenant's race in brief phone conversations and were less willing to rent to minority tenants. Was that also just sound, evidence based reasoning?
- midjji 5y ago
  Few challenge that the children of highly educated parents have higher academic achievement. As highly educated parents is strongly correlated with upper class. This is enough to make it quite likely that someone from an upper class background will be the better candidate in expectation, even if the only information you get is the socioeconomic background. We can quibble over details, but the more you dig into this the more convincing this will become. It does not matter as you already believe this. With regards to minority tenants, institutionalized racism often leads to the case that non-racist agents will have sound evidence based reasons to discriminate. Not based on the properties of the group discriminated, but based on the behaviour of a third party. A decent example is if banks discriminate against a group, then their availability of credit is worse. This can create self perpetuating circles of discrimination, which can be sustained even if all involved organisations and individuals aren't racist. For a hilarious example of something similar, see: https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg This is a communication and organisational failure, not racism, but its difficult to distinguish, but critically yes, it means it could be. Non-discrimination and positive discrimination is best viewed as taxes designed to address this kind of problem, and its working. But the habit people have of challenging this kind of thing as a kneejerk reaction is harmful. What you are doing is essentially claiming that their judgements are corrupt or trying to shame by implied association, and that isn't helpful.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way. I would also challenge your notion. It is true that wealth is correlated with educational achievement. But educational achievement will not, in itself, lead to someone speaking in a way that is more patrician. Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position? It may even be the case that, assuming two people with the same education, the person from a lower class background is more likely to be exceptional.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      > Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position? No, that is why interviews should look more like the ones Google performs and less like "please describe yourself, hobbies and life experiences"
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        Yes, I agree. For all the complaints, I think it is a much fairer system than the alternative.
    - midjji 5y ago
      !As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way.! With the way you put it now, the people living within such systems would be racists taking racist actions based on sound evidence based reasoning. The term itself is also problematic, as no institutions nor race need to be involved for this kind of problem to occur, its simply the most familiar form to americans. Inadequate equilibria is better, but the corresponding the problem xxx would disappear if people weren't idiots isn't productive either. Just like it is not necessary for the upper class to be more educated, its not necessary for the more educated to speak upper class. But it is more likely. That such would be enough to stagnate social mobility seems like pessimistic hyperbole to me. Given that we are talking about high value added, high paying, i.e. worker shortage jobs and that there are significantly more demand for such workers than the upper class could provide, meaning, even at worst, such behaviour could only slow down social mobility, not stop it. If the people who are evaluated are drawn randomly from the population as they claim to in the study, then no. If its a real hiering situation, then possibly yes, though it depends on how the position was advertised. That however may not even change the outcome of the study. In most big companies recruiters are not looking for the best applicant for the job, or atleast have no incentives to do so. They are looking for the easiest to motivate hiring for the job. Similarly, their boss may not have ordered them to find the best worker for the job, they likely asked for a good enough worker who causes minimum issues and who if they cause issues were easy to motivate having hired in the first place. Note that I never claimed that upper class speech meant better at the job, I explicitly wrote academic achievement, i.e the kind of thing which makes for an easily justified hire. Imagine having hired Dr House except without a degree, or a slightly below average doctor with an average grade degree. Now one is plain better, but the other will never get you fired. But thats a whole other problem.

HPsquared 6y ago

I wonder what the class breakdown would be if the hiring managers had access to all other relevant information about the candidates, EXCEPT socioeconomic class... I'd expect the more 'upper class' candidates probably would do better on average.

ingleswood 6y ago

Do you have a hypothetical explanation for why, if people are only allowed to evaluate speech and accent, they prefer a certain group, but if allowed to evaluate lots of different more meaningful things, which all lead to the same conclusion about competence EXCEPT for speech and accent, that preference no longer applies? That seems like an extraordinary claim unless you have some evidentiary base for it.

MauranKilom 6y ago
Sure, it's very credible that a general tendency will remain if other sources of information are available. The unresolved question is what weight is assigned to each preference. If a hiring decision is influenced to 0.01% by speech and accent and 99.99% by whatever you deem reasonable criteria, then what do you learn from filtering out the latter? And of course, decisions like this need not have linear behavior in reality either. A gross mismatch between different indicators could result in significantly worse hiring manager opinions than the (weighted) sum of the individual aspects. Imagine that a candidate shows moderate (but sufficient) aptitude but then tries to disguise it with "high brow" rhetoric. In isolation using such speech may be considered a positive, but in this case it will be probably be to their detriment.
- ingleswood 5y ago
  Isn't the existence in a more realistic hiring process of a huge weight of objective and reasonable criteria an unjustified, unlikely and politically subjective assumption? Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0.01% by speech and accent, 64.99% by other class, race and gender markers, and 35% by reasonable criteria such as competence? Why wouldn't this be your base case assumption?
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    > Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias No such thing was shown in this study. The study makes no attempt to measure E(skills | social class). For all we know, the hiring managers provided an unbiased (i.e. the opposite of "irrational bias") estimate of the expected skills conditioned on the social class of the applicant, absent any other information.