Seminar

Cognitive Discrimination

Michèle Belot (Oxford University)

March 15, 2010, 15:30–17:00

Toulouse

Room Amphi Colloque

Department Seminar

Abstract

This study provides a first set of experimental results highlighting a new mechanism for racial discrimination, based on a cognitive limitation in facial re-identification across races. An experiment is conducted to study how people record and recall payoff-relevant information about others, within and across races. East-Asian and White subjects see an equal number of pictures of East-Asian and White faces and each face is mapped to a payoff-relevant value. Incentives are provided to recall faces associated with higher values. We observe a clear asymmetry in the accuracy of recall: High value faces are more accurately recalled within race than across races. I contrast these results with a treatment where race is a distinctive attribute for a minority of faces (where there is only a small number of pictures of East-Asians). In that case, I find that East- Asians are favored both by White and East-Asian subjects. That is, the biases identified in the first treatment cannot be attributed to prejudice or preferences. These results raise new questions on the implications of such cognitive biases for the nature of cross-racial relations, in particular for phenomena relying on reidentification, such as the formation and maintenance of social ties, the establishment of trust and the sustainability of cooperation. Keywords: Own-Race-Bias, Discrimination, Face Recognition, Bounded Memory, Identity