> 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 outc

> 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 No, because as other people replying to you have stated, being able to observe "other things" is the crucial difference between an actual interview and what happened in this study. Inferences about variable X, depend on whether you can observe only Y, or also A,B,C,W,Z. Here is what an experiment measuring what you believe this one does would look like: - Find participants with a range of skills/experience and pair up participants from low social class with participants from high social class according to skill - Allow hiring managers to conduct realistic interview processes and grade the candidates - Assess the bias due to social class by looking at the differences in average rating for participants in each pair. If you have enough interviews/participants, you can also estimate the size of the bias from social class as a function of applicant skill - Issues: you do need another metric to quantify "skill" that does not rely on hiring managers performing interviews (education level, GPA, written tests, etc.) Here is what this experiment did: - Allow hiring managers to infer social class - Measure the expected skill given social class assigned by the managers with no other information present - Issues: decisions from "no other information present" and "after conducting a rigorous interview and all other (job related) things being equal" are not comparable