scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal ArticleDOI

Beauty and the Sources of Discrimination

01 Jul 2012-Journal of Human Resources (University of Wisconsin Press)-Vol. 47, Iss: 3, pp 851-872
TL;DR: The authors analyzed discrimination against less attractive people on a TV game show with high stakes and found that less attractive players are substantially more likely to be eliminated by their peers, even though this is costly.
Abstract: We analyze discrimination against less attractive people on a TV game show with high stakes. The game has a rich structure that allows us to disentangle the relationship between attractiveness and the determinants of a player's earnings. Unattractive players perform no worse than attractive ones, and are equally cooperative in the prisoner's dilemma stage of the game. Nevertheless, they are substantially more likely to be eliminated by their peers, even though this is costly. We investigate third party perceptions of discrimination by asking subjects to predict elimination decisions. Subjects implicitly assign a role for attractiveness but underestimate its magnitude.

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This survey is to provide a guidance and a glue for researchers and anti-discrimination data analysts on concepts, problems, application areas, datasets, methods, and approaches from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Abstract: The collection and analysis of observational and experimental data represent the main tools for assessing the presence, the extent, the nature, and the trend of discrimination phenomena. Data analysis techniques have been proposed in the last 50 years in the economic, legal, statistical, and, recently, in the data mining literature. This is not surprising, since discrimination analysis is a multidisciplinary problem, involving sociological causes, legal argumentations, economic models, statistical techniques, and computational issues. The objective of this survey is to provide a guidance and a glue for researchers and anti-discrimination data analysts on concepts, problems, application areas, datasets, methods, and approaches from a multidisciplinary perspective. We organize the approaches according to their method of data collection as observational, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies. A fourth line of recently blooming research on knowledge discovery based methods is also covered. Observational methods are further categorized on the basis of their application context: labor economics, social profiling, consumer markets, and others.

286 citations


Cites background from "Beauty and the Sources of Discrimin..."

  • ...Belot et al. (2012) disentangle the sources of favoritism to attractive people by analysing data from a TV game show based on the prisoner’s dilemma....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The neutral reminder has the strongest impact for the overall population as well as for important subgroups of patients, and being exposed to reminders repeatedly does neither strengthen nor weaken their effectiveness.
Abstract: We implement a randomized field experiment to study the impact of reminders on dental health prevention. Patients who are due for a check-up receive no reminder, a neutral reminder postcard, or reminders including additional information on the benefits of prevention. Our results document a strong impact of reminders. Within one month after receiving a reminder, the fraction of patients who make a check-up appointment more than doubles. The effect declines slightly over time, but remains economically and statistically significant. Including additional information in the reminders does not increase response rates. In fact, the neutral reminder has the strongest impact for the overall population as well as for important subgroups of patients. Finally, we document that being exposed to reminders repeatedly does neither strengthen nor weaken their effectiveness.

77 citations


Cites background from "Beauty and the Sources of Discrimin..."

  • ...In addition to health-related payoffs, healthy teeth may also yield higher wages (Glied and Neidell, 2010) and other benefits associated with beauty (e.g., Mocan and Tekin, 2010; Belot et al., 2012)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors investigate whether experimental subjects can predict behavior in a prisoner's dilemma played on a TV show and find that subjects correctly predict that women and players who make a voluntary promise are more likely to cooperate.
Abstract: We investigate whether experimental subjects can predict behavior in a prisoner's dilemma played on a TV show. Subjects report probabilistic beliefs that a player cooperates, before and after the players communicate. Subjects correctly predict that women and players who make a voluntary promise are more likely to cooperate. They are able to distinguish truth from lies when a player is asked about her intentions by the host. Subjects are to some extent able to predict behavior; their beliefs are 7~percentage points higher for cooperators than for defectors. We also study their Bayesian updating. Beliefs do not satisfy the martingale property and display mean reversion.

57 citations


Cites background from "Beauty and the Sources of Discrimin..."

  • ...A second implication of Bayesian updating from equation (3) is that for given subjective likelihood ratios, the extent of updating is a non-linear function of the prior, and the subject updates more for non-extremal priors, and less for extreme...

    [...]

  • ...Columns (1) and (2) are based on the whole sample, columns (3) and (4) are based on the Amsterdam sample only....

    [...]

  • ...Table 10 - Subject characteristics, prior and actual predictions All sample Amsterdam sample Dependent variable: Predictions Prior Predictions Prior (1) (2) (3) (4) Female ....

    [...]

  • ...πi(s) = μi i(s) μi i(s) + (1− μi) , (3)...

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors implemented a field experiment to study the impact of reminder messages on dental health prevention and found that within one month after receiving a reminder, the fraction of patients who make a check-up appointment more than doubled.

54 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, the authors found that showing voters these pictures increased the vote for appearance-advantaged candidates, while low-knowledge voters used appearance as a low-information heuristic.
Abstract: According to numerous studies, candidates’ looks predict voters’ choices—a finding that raises concerns about voter competence and about the quality of elected officials. This potentially worrisome finding, however, is observational and therefore vulnerable to alternative explanations. To better test the appearance effect, we conducted two experiments. Just before primary and general elections for various offices, we randomly assigned voters to receive ballots with and without candidate photos. Simply showing voters these pictures increased the vote for appearance-advantaged candidates. Experimental evidence therefore supports the view that candidates’ looks could influence some voters. In general elections, we find that high-knowledge voters appear immune to this influence, while low-knowledge voters use appearance as a low-information heuristic. In primaries, however, candidate appearance influences even high-knowledge and strongly partisan voters.

47 citations


Cites background from "Beauty and the Sources of Discrimin..."

  • ...Researchers in other fields have found that people routinely make costly decisions based on facial inferences even when those inferences are shown to be uninformative, such as when lending money online (Ravina 2012), eliminating competitors on a television game show (Belot et al. 2012), playing incentivized trust games (Wilson and Eckel 2006), and incentivized public goods games (Andreoni and Petrie 2008)....

    [...]

  • ...…those inferences are shown to be uninformative, such as when lending money online (Ravina 2012), eliminating competitors on a television game show (Belot et al. 2012), playing incentivized trust games (Wilson and Eckel 2006), and incentivized public goods games (Andreoni and Petrie 2008).20…...

    [...]

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute when instructions oblige highly associated categories to share a response key, and performance is faster than when less associated categories share a key.
Abstract: An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).

9,731 citations

Book
01 Jan 1957
TL;DR: The second edition of "The Economics of Discrimination" has been expanded to include three further discussions of the problem and an entirely new introduction which considers contributions made by others in recent years and some of the more important problems remaining as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This second edition of Gary S. Becker's "The Economics of Discrimination" has been expanded to include three further discussions of the problem and an entirely new introduction which considers the contributions made by others in recent years and some of the more important problems remaining. Mr. Becker's work confronts the economic effects of discrimination in the market place because of race, religion, sex, color, social class, personality, or other non-pecuniary considerations. He demonstrates that discrimination in the market place by any group reduces their own real incomes as well as those of the minority. The original edition of "The Economics of Discrimination" was warmly received by economists, sociologists, and psychologists alike for focusing the discerning eye of economic analysis upon a vital social problem-discrimination in the market place. "This is an unusual book; not only is it filled with ingenious theorizing but the implications of the theory are boldly confronted with facts. . . . The intimate relation of the theory and observation has resulted in a book of great vitality on a subject whose interest and importance are obvious."-M.W. Reder, "American Economic Review" "The author's solution to the problem of measuring the motive behind actual discrimination is something of a "tour de force." . . . Sociologists in the field of race relations will wish to read this book."-Karl Schuessler, "American Sociological Review"

3,219 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers and find that white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than African-Americans.
Abstract: We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for White names than for African-American ones. The racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry, and employer size. We also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names. Differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the U.S. labor market. (JEL J71, J64).

2,890 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment as discussed by the authors, and this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance, and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role.
Abstract: We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While 73 percent of the men select the tournament, only 35 percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance, and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role. Instead, the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it.

2,017 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor: women may be less effective than men in competitive environments, even if they are able to perform similarly in non-competitive environments.
Abstract: Even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries, large gender differences prevail in competitive high-ranking positions. Suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital. In this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor: women may be less effective than men in competitive environments, even if they are able to perform similarly in non-competitive environments. In a laboratory experiment we observe, as we increase the competitiveness of the environment, a significant increase in performance for men, but not for women. This results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments, while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate. This effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single-sex competitive environments: this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se.

1,943 citations