One thing to say about the study you cited is that I don’t think it was conducted well. The names chosen were steeped in confounding status effects. The “white names” (“Emily” and “Brendan”) were high status and they didn’t include white low status names like Seth, Clint, Cody, Angel, Neveah...I’d better stop, I’m having way too much fun with that list. The “black names” were not high status (“Lakisha” and “Jamal”) and they didn’t choose available black higher status names like Jasmine (sic), Andre, Jeremiah, or Xavier.
A minor nitpick—this isn’t just about perfectly competent people, the study interestingly found a constant relationship between interviews for both perfectly competent white-named/black-named and incompetent white-named/black-named people, with employers 1.5 times as likely to take chance on a poorly qualified “white-named” person as “black-named” person just as they are 1.5 times more likely to give an interview to a qualified “white-named” as “black-named” person.
They’re fundamentally different kinds of unfairness, and that’s why they provoke fundamentally different responses in people.
I think this is incontrovertibly true if reversed, but not as it is; they provoke different responses in people and that effects how we should treat each kind of unfairness, but I’m not sure that aside from that they are so different.
One person is born brilliant, ugly and fat, another good-looking and of average intelligence. Both of the same race, gender, propensity to work hard etc. Both work just as hard. They are given the same scores on their oral exams, do just as well in interviews, and so on. Both do just as well performing their job because the good-looking one does better on collective projects. It’s unfair that the first isn’t rewarded for his or her intelligence or given more opportunities, and this is because of his or her poor appearance, but he or she didn’t earn or deserve his or her intelligence in the first place.
I could easily be persuaded to support treating the different cases of unfairness differently on the mere grounds that humans feel they are different, if an intelligent way to treat them differently is articulated.
From the paper: “We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names.” Section 5 deals with this; “Carrie” and “Neil” (low-status white) do just as well as “Emily” and “Geoffrey”, while “Kenya” and “Jamal” (high-status black) do just as poorly as “Latonya” and “Leroy”.
A minor nitpick—this isn’t just about perfectly competent people
Absolutely—I should have said “equally competent” or “reasonably competent”.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on your example, though; I’ve rolled it around in my head a bit and can’t quite see how to fit it into the same framework. There are, I believe, organizations and affinity groups advocating for better treatment of fat people, at least. I don’t perceive ‘ugly’ or ‘fat’ as being the same sort of grouping as race, though, and I’m not sure where the difference comes from, exactly.
There was a weakness in the method, though. In appendix table one they not only show how likely it actually is that a baby with a certain name is white/black, they show the results from an independent field survey that asked people to pick names as white or black. In table eight, they only measure the likelihood someone with a certain name is in a certain class (as approximated by mother’s education). Unfortunately, they don’t show what people in general, or employers in particular, actually think. If they don’t know about class differences between “Kenya” and “Latonya,” or the lack of one between “Kenya” and “Carrie,” they can’t make a decision based on class differences as they actually are.
One thing to say about the study you cited is that I don’t think it was conducted well. The names chosen were steeped in confounding status effects. The “white names” (“Emily” and “Brendan”) were high status and they didn’t include white low status names like Seth, Clint, Cody, Angel, Neveah...I’d better stop, I’m having way too much fun with that list. The “black names” were not high status (“Lakisha” and “Jamal”) and they didn’t choose available black higher status names like Jasmine (sic), Andre, Jeremiah, or Xavier.
A minor nitpick—this isn’t just about perfectly competent people, the study interestingly found a constant relationship between interviews for both perfectly competent white-named/black-named and incompetent white-named/black-named people, with employers 1.5 times as likely to take chance on a poorly qualified “white-named” person as “black-named” person just as they are 1.5 times more likely to give an interview to a qualified “white-named” as “black-named” person.
I think this is incontrovertibly true if reversed, but not as it is; they provoke different responses in people and that effects how we should treat each kind of unfairness, but I’m not sure that aside from that they are so different.
One person is born brilliant, ugly and fat, another good-looking and of average intelligence. Both of the same race, gender, propensity to work hard etc. Both work just as hard. They are given the same scores on their oral exams, do just as well in interviews, and so on. Both do just as well performing their job because the good-looking one does better on collective projects. It’s unfair that the first isn’t rewarded for his or her intelligence or given more opportunities, and this is because of his or her poor appearance, but he or she didn’t earn or deserve his or her intelligence in the first place.
I could easily be persuaded to support treating the different cases of unfairness differently on the mere grounds that humans feel they are different, if an intelligent way to treat them differently is articulated.
From the paper: “We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names.” Section 5 deals with this; “Carrie” and “Neil” (low-status white) do just as well as “Emily” and “Geoffrey”, while “Kenya” and “Jamal” (high-status black) do just as poorly as “Latonya” and “Leroy”.
Absolutely—I should have said “equally competent” or “reasonably competent”.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on your example, though; I’ve rolled it around in my head a bit and can’t quite see how to fit it into the same framework. There are, I believe, organizations and affinity groups advocating for better treatment of fat people, at least. I don’t perceive ‘ugly’ or ‘fat’ as being the same sort of grouping as race, though, and I’m not sure where the difference comes from, exactly.
This makes me think that you are right.
There was a weakness in the method, though. In appendix table one they not only show how likely it actually is that a baby with a certain name is white/black, they show the results from an independent field survey that asked people to pick names as white or black. In table eight, they only measure the likelihood someone with a certain name is in a certain class (as approximated by mother’s education). Unfortunately, they don’t show what people in general, or employers in particular, actually think. If they don’t know about class differences between “Kenya” and “Latonya,” or the lack of one between “Kenya” and “Carrie,” they can’t make a decision based on class differences as they actually are.