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A Misattribution Theory of Discrimination

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A Misattribution Theory of Discrimination A MISATTRIBUTION THEORY OF DISCRIMINATION KYLE P. CHAUVIN June 24, 2021 Abstract. This paper analyzes how Fundamental Attribution Error, the tendency to judge others without accounting for their circumstances, warps beliefs about social groups and drives discrim- ination. I model a self-sustaining cycle in which agents observe outcome (e.g. test score) gaps across groups, mistakenly attribute those gaps to trait (e.g. ability) differences, and then discrim- inate on the basis of those beliefs, influencing the observed outcome gaps. In equilibrium, agents of different groups agree about the relative ordering of groups by trait level while systematically disagreeing in absolute terms. The paper further characterizes equilibrium beliefs and compares different de-biasing policy alternatives. JEL Classification: C72, D84, J15, J16 Keywords: Behavioral Game Theory, Belief Formation, Inequality, Statistical Discrimination Department of Economics, Harvard University. [email protected]. My sincere thanks to Roland B´enabou, Sylvain Chassang, and Faruk Gul for their support and assistance. This paper has benefited from useful comments from, among others, Dilip Abreu, Katherine Coffman, Mira Frick, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Daniel Gottlieb, Nikhil Gupta, Anna Hopper, Ryota Iijima, Alex Jakobsen, David Laibson, Stephen Morris, Axel Ockenfels, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Matthew Rabin, Charlie Sprenger, Justin Sydnor, Michael Thaler, and Leeat Yariv, as well as from presentations at various institutions. 1. Introduction Beliefs about the innate characteristics of gender, racial, and other social groups are common- place and powerful. Explicitly or implicitly, from the notion that men and women have different abilities to assumptions that some racial groups are inherently more intelligent, hard-working, or criminal than others, these beliefs propel discrimination1 and impact public welfare. Although clas- sical economic models predict that group-trait beliefs should be accurate conditional probabilities (Arrow, 1973; Coate and Loury, 1993), such beliefs have been shown to include the influence of psychological biases such as stereotypes (Hilton and von Hippel, 1996; Schneider, 2004; Bordalo et al., 2016), in-group favoritism (Tajfel et al., 1971), or implicit associations (Greenwald et al., 2009). This paper studies a particular pathway by which cognitive biases influence discriminatory beliefs: people observe outcome gaps across groups, attribute the outcome gaps to trait differences, and then discriminate in ways that contribute to the very outcome gaps they sought to explain. For example, people learn that boys get higher math test scores, infer that boys are `more suited to math' than are girls, and differentially invest in the success of male students. Likewise, employers may discriminate on the basis of race when they observe more examples of success in certain groups relative to others. Police officers may differentially screen suspects from particular groups known to have higher arrest rates. These examples are cases of what psychologists term Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) (Ross, 1977),2 the tendency to \underestimate the impact of the situation and overestimate [the 1Empirical studies have documented the presence of discrimination in numerous contexts. Examples include audit studies showing discrimination against racial (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004; Doleac and Stein, 2013; Edelman, Luca and Svirsky, 2017) and religious (Acquisti and Fong, 2019) minorities and women (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012). Other methodologies have uncovered bias against women (Goldin and Rouse, 2000; Sarsons, 2017) and ethnic sub- groups (Rubinstein and Brenner, 2014). See Bertrand(2011), Bertrand and Duflo(2017), Neumark(2018), Lang and Lehmann(2012) and Fang and Moro(2010) for useful surveys of the literature. Although the degree to which such discrimination is driven by beliefs and how much by preferences remains an open question (Guryan and Charles, 2013), some studies (List, 2004; Levitt, 2004; Pope and Sydnor, 2011; Coffman, Exley and Niederle, 2199) find levels of discrimination that are difficult to attribute to animus, indicating beliefs are a significant factor. 2Also called the `correspondence bias' (Gilbert and Malone, 1995), the FAE has a long history of experimental evidence in social psychology. Lab subjects have been found to overestimate the extent to which a fellow subject's argument on a debate topic, despite being assigned by the experimenter, reflects fellow subject's true opinion (e.g. Jones and Harris(1967)). Subjects viewing a silent tape of an anxious interviewee attribute her behavior to innate anxiety to an equal extent when informed either that the interview concerned a contentious or mundane topic (e.g. Snyder and Frankel(1976)). When one among two subjects is randomly selected to pose tricky questions to the other, observers believe that the questioner is smarter than the answering subject (e.g. Block and Funder(1986)). In the infamous Milgram(1963) experiment, many participants were successfully coached into delivering what they believed was a near fatal electric shock on another lab participant. In Bierbrauer(1979), subjects who learned about 1 impact of] the individual's traits and attitudes" (Myers, 2012) when explaining features about another person. By ignoring situational factors, people internalize a direct correspondence linking one's internal traits with observable outcomes. In particular, the FAE blinds them to the otherwise obvious fact that different people face different circumstances. Observers may acknowledge that discrimination exists in society, engage in it themselves, and still fail to account for it when judging others. This paper models and analyzes a self-sustaining cycle in which people explain group- outcome differences as group-trait differences, develop beliefs that lead them to discriminate on the basis of group status, and perpetuate the very outcome gaps they sought to explain. Section2 presents the main model, using the domain of education as a constant example throughout.3 A population of agents are matched together in pairs as students and teachers. Agents belong to one of a set of social groups, such as those defined by race or gender. Students have a privately-observed ability type, and teachers maintain beliefs about the expected abilities of students of each group. In each matched pair, the teacher first observes the student's group and then chooses a level of investment in the student's education. The student observes the teacher's investment level and chooses his own effort level. Together, the teacher's investment and the student's effort prepare the student for an exam. As mediated through the two parties' choice of effort levels, the student's ultimate score can be understood as a joint function of his actual ability and the teacher's belief about his group. All agents in the population infer their beliefs about groups by observing each group's aggregate exam scores. Because they are subject to the FAE, agents acting as observers incorrectly assume that scores depend only on student abilities. Their reasoning is logically inconsistent, as agents who engage in discrimination themselves simultaneously assume away the effect of any discrimination the earlier experiment attributed the willingness of participants to inflict pain to innate evil and not the situational power of the experiment. See Gawronski(2004) for a survey of psychology experiments on the bias. Pettigrew(1979) in fact proposed an extension of the FAE to explicitly consider social groups, but framed his `ultimate attribution error' as a form of in-group preference, by which negative out-group behaviors are attributed to innate negative characteristics. Economists have long acknowledged that empathy is difficult and that people understand the world through a localized lens of experience. Adam Smith said as much in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: \As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation." Smith(1759). More recently the FAE has been studied within economics. Glaeser and Ponzetto(2017) study the consequences for political economy when voters judge their politicians without accounting for circumstances. In lab experiments, Durell(2001) and Cartwright and Wooders(2014) find subjects rating the performance of other subjects without correctly adjusting for the conditions the other subjects faced. 3Education is a particularly salient example for misattribution. Because children have relatively short track records, teachers and other adults working with them must rely more heavily on expectations. Many of the paper's results, however, are equally applicable to other example domains, such as employers and workers. 2 when evaluating others; it is precisely this inconsistency to which the FAE blinds them. The supposed mapping between ability and score is calibrated by own-group experiences: each observer presumes that the ability-to-score relationship which in reality holds for the observer's own group also holds for every student in the population.4 When beliefs successively updated in this way converge, the resulting belief profile is a misattribution equilibrium: teachers maintain a profile of beliefs which, together with students' actual abilities, lead to scores from which agents, as observers, infer the same profile of beliefs. As in a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, teachers and students choose optimal actions on the
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