NBA Corruption

With Tyler talking about the brewing allegations of NBA referees throwing games, I thought some readers might want to read this older NYT article talking about Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price's work on evidence the economists found that NBA referees racially discriminated against players. The greater the caucasian composition of the refs, the more likely Black players have fouls called against them.

A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.

The paper is now under "revise and resubmit" at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The Price-Wolfers evidence does not have exact identification, because they only know the racial composition of the refs in the game, and not who actually called the foul and therefore whether the ref was himself Black or White. From my understanding, to circumvent this kind of ecological fallacy problem, they do numerous robustness and placebo checks on their results to try and rule out competing hypotheses so as to determine whether it is, in fact, the discrimination hypothesis or some omitted variable explanation consistent with the patterns they find. I think the authors largely attribute the bias to something subconscious, interestingly. The little I read of the paper a few years ago mentioned that some of this bias was believed to be caused by refs making split-second decisions, and it's believed by psychologists that split-second decisions allow deeply held, subtle prejudices to come out, since it takes mental effort to fight those impulses. Another quote from the article:

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Interestingly, this topic kind of came up last night at the poker game. One of my friends took issue with the tendency in his profession for people to use the pronoun "her" and "she" in place of the historical usage of "him" and "he." One student complained that in a lecture, my friend used the phrase "mankind" instead of "humankind." He had a layered argument as to why he refused to capitulate and use the female-gendered pronoun, but one reason he gave was that the male-gendered pronoun was the more natural usage - historically, that usage had evolved and was adopted because for some reason it was preferred by most people. I didn't think of this last night, but saying it evolved does not mean that it was not itself the product of bias. That it takes effort to not use it, too, doesn't mean it's illegitimate to strive to do that. Going back to the NBA referee example, things which arise naturally to the ref in split second decisions are essentially biases, and it takes effort to suppress those conclusions, but it does not make that effort any less important a goal. That's just one argument that was put forward, though, and there were other things my friend said, but reading the Price-Wolfers NYT article again, I wondered what my friend might say about that findings relevance to gendered pronouns in language.