Can awareness reduce (and reverse) identity-driven bias in judgement? Evidence from international cricket
利用新冠疫情导致国际板球裁判从中立裁判回归主场裁判的自然实验，发现高度关注和审查下，主场裁判不仅消除了偏袒主队的偏见，反而出现了过度补偿，偏向客队。
Competitions often suffer from biased judgments by officials tied to their social identities. In international cricket, home nation umpires favoured home teams, but neutral umpires were introduced successfully to address this bias. However, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the return of home umpires, creating a natural experiment amid heightened scrutiny, modern technology, and sometimes empty stadiums. Consistent with the predictions of our behavioural model, we find no evidence of in-group bias during the pandemic; instead, we observe evidence of over-compensation. The pre-pandemic home team advantage in ‘leg before wicket’ decisions vanished, with home umpires seemingly favouring the away opposition, compared with neutral umpires in the period before, especially in more marginal or difficult decisions. This suggests that awareness and scrutiny can not only eliminate identity-driven judgement bias but may even reverse it.