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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 evaluat

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 5y 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.
    - ingleswood 5y ago
      Interesting that you are claiming both that people making hiring decisions are not biased along class lines and that any such bias would be rational and based on ability.

MauranKilom 5y 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.
  - ingleswood 5y ago
    Interesting that you are claiming both that people making hiring decisions are not biased along class lines and that any such bias would be rational and based on ability.