Awareness Reduces Racial Bias
利用2007年学术研究引发媒体关注职业篮球裁判种族偏见的自然实验，发现媒体曝光后裁判的种族偏见消失，表明提高意识能减少隐性偏见。
Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we confirm that racial bias persisted in the years after the study’s original sample but prior to the media coverage. Subsequent to the media coverage, though, the bias disappeared. Several potential mechanisms may have produced this result, including voluntary behavior changes by individual referees, adjustments by players to new information, and changes in referee behavior due to institutional pressure. These results suggest a new kind of Hawthorne effect in which greater scrutiny of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change. This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.