> Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social status.
So while I don't fault the study here, it's not clear that this really demonstrates what the title says ("shows bias in hiring"). It shows bias if you tell a hiring manager they need to make a hiring decision based on no actual interviewing. It'd be like if a candidate came in for an interview, made 60 seconds of small talk, and then the hiring manager had to immediately make an offer. And, yeah, I'm not surprised that in a situation like that, hiring managers make decisions based on the slimmest of signals, amplifying class-based biases. Would they have way less bias if given any real signal about a candidate's fitness for a job? That's not shown one way or another according to this press release.
That said, I generally do believe the thesis here (that speech patterns influence class perceptions which significantly bias hiring), even if I'm not convinced that this particular study shows that.
Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering.
It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason? Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's background, employer's were left to use the signals they could pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The solution was to allow background checks again.
It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway. So it's not testing for anything real.
(Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)
It's worse than that - the hiring managers were accurately identifying things that matter. The article isn't saying that the hiring managers were unfairly biased, but that they were somehow able to pick up on traits (their level of education, their level of professional success) that they'd otherwise care about.
It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found.
To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.
It's quite common to infer social status from speech. Since the level of education used to correlate with social status, it made sense to have a preference. If that correlation still holds is hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised.
It's wild how people with different assumptions about the world can read the same thing, focus on the same part, and walk away with opposite conclusions.
I read that as them trying to control for other factors and get a clean signal to demonstrate their hypothesis as a testable, verifiable, and falsifiable phenomenon.
But some people apparently think that the process of isolation IS the confounding factor that produces the results.
This makes things difficult. If they don't do this people will accuse them of not controlling for everything but when they do do it then they say "well yeah, you're controlling for everything else, of course you'll get that".
The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome
I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy.
Racial discrimination also occurs.
A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all.
You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial bias claim.
There once was a study where they eloquently demonstrated this by putting the same white actor into two situations: one had him lay down acting like he was dying from a hear attack in front of Wall Street wearing a suit. The other had him doing the same thing but wearing worn out sports clothing.
They found that people responded more favorably to the actor when he appeared to be of the same social class.
as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more resources growing up.
I must say it also looks rather beneficial to some - while the lower classes are duking it out over a divisive issue the upper classes are safe from social reform. Divide and rule.
Totally agree with you. Which explain why African immigrant that speak (proper) English and wear a suit and tie. Don't have trouble in job interview even if they are "black". While the Black American blame it on racism.
>A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all.
It works so well and so consistently one might be fooled into think it is by design to protect social elites.
99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical
Or, your assumptions of values, ethics, and how humans function is twisted in a knot. Humans are built to synthesize multitudes of facts, signals, etc using a rubric of experience. The result is imperfect.
Racial equality is a moot point since there are no races. Everyone can even make their children a different color/race by simply "marrying" someone of the desired color/"race".
Removing the idea people are segregated in races, a fight long won in Europe, should maybe be the first priority in America. I still can't believe pollers are allowed to split vote intention by random color groups (I'd be ok with segregating by "descendant of slaves, recent immigrant from africa, recent immigrant from Canada, things like that - but "black" means literally nothing at all).
The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race into consideration.
For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all.
The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth).
That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study.
A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.
Doesn't suprise me. My wife is from a rural town in NC, and was told by her high school teachers that she needed to lose her southern accent if she wanted to be taken seriously in college. When she was working on or master's degree in Maryland, a writing professor commented "you speak and write so well, I never would have guessed you're from the south". That kind of discrimination is very prevalent in academia and media in general, but nobody cares.
A good friend of mine works a logistical analysis job that involves dealing with a lot of warehouses and warehouse workers. There is a saying in the offices of his company that goes: "Get your head out of the warehouse!" This is a play on the popular "Get your head out of the gutter" and is jokingly used in the offices when people say something considered lewd/offensive.
This company brags about its major focus on "diversity" and "helping the underprivileged", but no one bats an eye when "warehouse worker" is used synonymously with "gutter trash".
This company is also shocked--just shocked!--that so few warehouse workers sign up for their "career transformation" program that promises to help educate warehouse staff for office jobs. Because why wouldn't they want to get away from their dirty, dirty warehouse? /s
This is such a huge issue in America, and I feel there's far too little conversation about it. I'm happy to see these kinds of studies shed a bit of light on it.
I've always wondered with things like this, could it be possible to make all interaction "text-based" until final stage?
Specifically for hiring:
What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the interview process all interactions were text-based and they were addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit (hopefully) and not on economic status, race, gender, etc.
I admit this isn't exactly well thought out, just a thought I've had as a possible way to hopefully weed out any areas for bias to creep into the process.
Interestingly, Automattic (where I work) is completely text-based throughout the entire hiring process for many roles. The first interview is via Slack, the code test and trial stages are via pull requests, slack, and p2. It’s great because day-to-day work uses these async tools rather than calls. So it’s more accurate anyways.
Because (admittedly an extreme example) if I'm hiring for a public-facing position, I don't want to get someone with pink and blue hair, excessive piercings and poor hygiene even if they're smart and capable of performing the job function otherwise.
In at least some cases, presenting and conducting yourself as a "normal" person is important.
I wonder if there are socioeconomic indicators in writing style, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were, even if we consider only text in which grammar and spelling are correct. (As a small example, there are ways to sound more or less like a mathematician, even when writing about topics unrelated to math.)
Sounds like applying for a loan right now. The person at the bank puts a few numbers into a computer that ties to a big database maintained by Experian/TransUnion/Equifax/ProfessionalParasites, and then it decides if I should get a loan or not.
So, slight devils advocate, but there are some economics at play as well. If someone presents themselves as having a lot of options, and they've chosen the field you are interviewing them for, they're probably pretty good at it - because to have options, they must be. It signals a bargaining position.
The other piece is that few people understand what elite competition really is. You don't just act a certain way or have certain taste, collect some symbols, and then you win.
In olympic sports, the competitors are at super human levels to qualify, and yet the margins of victory and loss between them are tiny. Milliseconds, milimeters, grams. That difference of performance in the moment is the effect of a training trajectory of months and years that culminates in what is essentially a psychological advantage in the moment of performance. That's pretty close to what class is. It's the effect of a long trajectory.
People who train don't take big risks, they develop technique so they don't lose a season to an injury. Similarly, the advantage of class means you never have to bet what you couldn't afford to lose, which makes you a safer bet in a corporate interview situation.
It doesn't sound very equitable, but if you can't easily fake it, it may actually be an honest signal.
Is class stereotype bias accurate? I don't know. But if so then the optimal amount of actual bias may be nonzero. So does the study show the right amount of bias, too little, or too much?
It wouldn't be easy to measure the correlation between classes and employee performance, but not impossible either. Lacking such data it's hard to know how to interpret such results.
Of course any such bias should be deeply discounted by any actual personal data you can gather. Any group-based bias should be considered trivial in comparison. But this study is designed to only consider class signals.
I do the same thing when I hear people speak. Certain American dialects will make me rate a person's ability, intelligence, or trustworthiness more or less highly. I am aware of it and do what I can to mitigate the effects, yet it does not stop these biases from triggering consciously and I'm sure unconsciously.
Also: weight, looks, gender, attire, name, skin color, mannerisms, confidence, positivity/enthusiasm/attitude/energy, and age are definitely biases that will get candidates hired or discarded.
It never clicked to me at the time, but when I was 14-18, I was offered interviews for office jobs nearly everyday where other workers were 25+ and had degrees. At 15, by attending a colloquia at IBM, I was offered a paid dark matter research assistant job, which didn't make any rational sense. I think it was physical attributes and speech bias rather than utility for a particular job.
P.S. Back around 1975, John Molloy wrote "Dress For Success" in which he noted that men wearing a tan trenchcoat got better jobs and pay than men wearing a black trenchcoat. Black trenchcoats quickly disappeared :-)
I still have my London Fog tan trenchcoat circa 1980.
Newsbreak: A Univ of YALE study/research confirms that you'll have a better chance to get hired if you talk like a YALE professor at your job interview. Unless the job interview is working the cash register at Sonic's.
>The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that people can accurately assess a stranger’s socioeconomic position — defined by their income, education, and occupation status
One takeaway here is that biases tend to be correct, which makes them that much harder to eliminate.
>"They discovered that speech adhering to subjective standards for English as well as digital standards — i.e. the voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant — is associated with both actual and perceived higher social class."
I'd be interested in learning exactly what these "standards" are. I have a harder time understanding slurred speech and when people leave off the end consonant sounds, for instance, and will likely have a bias against that. (I'm reminded of this profound elocution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzHIs7j1CCs ) Good diction is just easier and more pleasing to listen to.
I think I've only experienced actual diction / speaking lessons in a theater class, but it's a useful skill in general.
“ The researchers based their findings on five separate studies. The first four examined the extent that people accurately perceive social class based on a few seconds of speech. They found that reciting seven random words is sufficient to allow people to discern the speaker’s social class with above-chance accuracy. They discovered that speech adhering to subjective standards for English as well as digital standards — i.e. the voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant — is associated with both actual and perceived higher social class. The researchers also showed that pronunciation cues in an individual’s speech communicate their social status more accurately than the content of their speech.”
Social class may very well be highly correlated with competency - even moreso than any other information a hiring manager may have access to - and therefore a good indicator for a hiring manager to use.
The article seems to be saying that the study shows that hiring managers are able to identify with not a lot of interaction candidates that are well-educated, gainfully employed and earn a high salary and unsurprisingly favors such candidates. This is not class bias - you can't just define class as that which employers care about and then accuse hiring managers of having a class bias when they understandably look for these traits.
Does it apply in tech space? I've seen so many hires barely speaking any English. Ultimately what gets the deal is how cheap one can sell themselves, then the managers don't care about the rest.
[+] [-] fishtoaster|4 years ago|reply
> Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social status.
So while I don't fault the study here, it's not clear that this really demonstrates what the title says ("shows bias in hiring"). It shows bias if you tell a hiring manager they need to make a hiring decision based on no actual interviewing. It'd be like if a candidate came in for an interview, made 60 seconds of small talk, and then the hiring manager had to immediately make an offer. And, yeah, I'm not surprised that in a situation like that, hiring managers make decisions based on the slimmest of signals, amplifying class-based biases. Would they have way less bias if given any real signal about a candidate's fitness for a job? That's not shown one way or another according to this press release.
That said, I generally do believe the thesis here (that speech patterns influence class perceptions which significantly bias hiring), even if I'm not convinced that this particular study shows that.
[+] [-] beaner|4 years ago|reply
It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason? Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's background, employer's were left to use the signals they could pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The solution was to allow background checks again.
It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway. So it's not testing for anything real.
(Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)
[+] [-] candybar|4 years ago|reply
It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found.
To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.
[+] [-] tgv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|4 years ago|reply
I read that as them trying to control for other factors and get a clean signal to demonstrate their hypothesis as a testable, verifiable, and falsifiable phenomenon.
But some people apparently think that the process of isolation IS the confounding factor that produces the results.
This makes things difficult. If they don't do this people will accuse them of not controlling for everything but when they do do it then they say "well yeah, you're controlling for everything else, of course you'll get that".
The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
Racial discrimination also occurs.
A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all.
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial bias claim.
[+] [-] 9wzYQbTYsAIc|4 years ago|reply
They found that people responded more favorably to the actor when he appeared to be of the same social class.
[+] [-] flavius29663|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|4 years ago|reply
There was a study on that recently:
https://osf.io/tdkf3/
[+] [-] skyde|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|4 years ago|reply
It works so well and so consistently one might be fooled into think it is by design to protect social elites.
[+] [-] fighterpilot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikVandeWater|4 years ago|reply
> 99% correlation to racial discrimination
suggests that other races do not occupy the lower classes in any significant numbers compared to Blacks. I'd say 40ish %, which is still very high.
[+] [-] splitstud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwolfi|4 years ago|reply
Removing the idea people are segregated in races, a fight long won in Europe, should maybe be the first priority in America. I still can't believe pollers are allowed to split vote intention by random color groups (I'd be ok with segregating by "descendant of slaves, recent immigrant from africa, recent immigrant from Canada, things like that - but "black" means literally nothing at all).
[+] [-] heterodoxxed|4 years ago|reply
For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all.
The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth).
That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study.
A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.
[+] [-] hn8788|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paperwasp42|4 years ago|reply
This company brags about its major focus on "diversity" and "helping the underprivileged", but no one bats an eye when "warehouse worker" is used synonymously with "gutter trash".
This company is also shocked--just shocked!--that so few warehouse workers sign up for their "career transformation" program that promises to help educate warehouse staff for office jobs. Because why wouldn't they want to get away from their dirty, dirty warehouse? /s
This is such a huge issue in America, and I feel there's far too little conversation about it. I'm happy to see these kinds of studies shed a bit of light on it.
[+] [-] howeyc|4 years ago|reply
Specifically for hiring:
What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the interview process all interactions were text-based and they were addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit (hopefully) and not on economic status, race, gender, etc.
I admit this isn't exactly well thought out, just a thought I've had as a possible way to hopefully weed out any areas for bias to creep into the process.
[+] [-] fighterpilot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahtallen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|4 years ago|reply
I have no qualms over a test. We all need to take tests.
Give all applicants a few written tests on the job they are hiring for.
The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis.
I might even exclude references, and schooling?
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
In at least some cases, presenting and conducting yourself as a "normal" person is important.
[+] [-] cauliflower2718|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hpoe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
The other piece is that few people understand what elite competition really is. You don't just act a certain way or have certain taste, collect some symbols, and then you win.
In olympic sports, the competitors are at super human levels to qualify, and yet the margins of victory and loss between them are tiny. Milliseconds, milimeters, grams. That difference of performance in the moment is the effect of a training trajectory of months and years that culminates in what is essentially a psychological advantage in the moment of performance. That's pretty close to what class is. It's the effect of a long trajectory.
People who train don't take big risks, they develop technique so they don't lose a season to an injury. Similarly, the advantage of class means you never have to bet what you couldn't afford to lose, which makes you a safer bet in a corporate interview situation.
It doesn't sound very equitable, but if you can't easily fake it, it may actually be an honest signal.
[+] [-] hirundo|4 years ago|reply
It wouldn't be easy to measure the correlation between classes and employee performance, but not impossible either. Lacking such data it's hard to know how to interpret such results.
Of course any such bias should be deeply discounted by any actual personal data you can gather. Any group-based bias should be considered trivial in comparison. But this study is designed to only consider class signals.
[+] [-] rednerrus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobthepanda|4 years ago|reply
It's not that much of a stretch to say that if real estate agents or landlords do it, that hiring professionals also do it.
[+] [-] paradox242|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carpedimebagjoe|4 years ago|reply
It never clicked to me at the time, but when I was 14-18, I was offered interviews for office jobs nearly everyday where other workers were 25+ and had degrees. At 15, by attending a colloquia at IBM, I was offered a paid dark matter research assistant job, which didn't make any rational sense. I think it was physical attributes and speech bias rather than utility for a particular job.
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
See "My Fair Lady".
What else matters:
1. height
2. vocabulary
3. posture
4. clothes (see "Dress For Success")
5. age
6. attractiveness
7. health
"Just yew wight, 'enry 'iggins, just yew wight!"
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
I still have my London Fog tan trenchcoat circa 1980.
[+] [-] javier10e6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|4 years ago|reply
One takeaway here is that biases tend to be correct, which makes them that much harder to eliminate.
[+] [-] shannifin|4 years ago|reply
I'd be interested in learning exactly what these "standards" are. I have a harder time understanding slurred speech and when people leave off the end consonant sounds, for instance, and will likely have a bias against that. (I'm reminded of this profound elocution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzHIs7j1CCs ) Good diction is just easier and more pleasing to listen to.
I think I've only experienced actual diction / speaking lessons in a theater class, but it's a useful skill in general.
[+] [-] 9wzYQbTYsAIc|4 years ago|reply
From the article.
[+] [-] CryptoPunk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candybar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Donald|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiawe_fire|4 years ago|reply
Is there any frame of reference for what characterizes a “higher class” speech pattern compared to a “lower class” one?