Back in 2007, The New York Times published the preliminary results of a study by economists Joe Price and Justin Wolfers on racial bias in NBA referees. It suggested that white referees called more fouls against black players and vice versa.
Rather than accepting that this implicit bias existed in the NBA, as it does in society at large, David Stern, the NBA commissioner, condemned the research. Somewhat misguidedly, some NBA stars even came out and assured us all that the NBA wasn’t racist. After the initial uproar, the conflict slowly went away.
However, on Friday, the full study was finally published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a widely respected peer-review journal. This all but verifies the initial results.
As Henry Abbot of True Hoop points out, what Stern—and anyone else who was quick to denounce the original Times piece—didn’t realize is that most of us maintain some sort of implicit racial bias. It doesn’t appear when we make well thought-out decisions, but when we make quick, snap judgments. It’s what Malcolm Gladwell’s second bestseller, Blink, is based around.
Abbot wrote:
The lesson Gladwell, Winfrey, Harvard researchers, and others took from this was about environment: We may have reached a point where a lot of explicit racism (the kinds of things we’d associate with hate speech, the klan, segregation, and the like) is largely behind us. But our brains are still bombarded with images of “bad” black people and “good” white ones, which affects our quick reactions to white and black faces.
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For the study, Price and Wolfers analyzed over 600,000 calls from the 1991 to the 2004 NBA season. Price said:
It’s not that we found there are any referees who are really racially biased. It’s just that there’s this consistent pattern, that black referees tend to favor black players and that white referees tend to favor white players. And the other thing that we found is that highest level of racial bias occurs when you have all white referees or all black referees.
This isn’t a damning statistic for the NBA, regardless of what Stern thinks. It only verifies that NBA refs are human just like the rest of us. We’re all a little bit racist. Don’t believe me? Find out for yourself.
As a lifelong basketball player, an a white guy, I can tell you that my experience has been when playing with black players the pushing, grabbing and, in particular, deliberate high elbows go WAY UP! Does this translate up to the NBA level? Do black players get a little more dirty when seeing a white face in front of them? My own experience says it’s possible and maybe, just maybe the reason why black players are called for more fouls against whites is because they FOUL MORE! I remember this study and while I am suspicious of these type of… Read more »
Hold on a sec…
I’m not trying to be flippant, but this year black players make up 82% of the NBA. So wouldn’t it make sense that more fouls are called on black players since they are the overwhelming majority in the league??
Mods, is there a reason the studies I cited and linked to were not included in my comment? They were to support two of my claims and not spam.
Yes, we all have implicit biases, for which we are not blameworthy in the sense of being responsible for developing them. We’re born into culture and programmed from early ages on to stereotype groups. However, there is research into how to counter implicit biases (and since they are unconscious, such strategies require rewiring our reactions rather than giving us new beliefs). So instead of concluding “we’re all human,” shrugging, and leaving it at that, this news is evidence of how deeply some of our human limitations run. Having discovered that our calibration is “off” in a certain way, we ought… Read more »