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Class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
Candidates at job interviews expect to be evaluated on their experience, conduct, and ideas, but a new study by Yale researchers provides evidence that interviewees are judged based on their social status seconds after they start to speak.
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 -- based on brief speech patterns and shows that these snap perceptions influence hiring managers in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes.
"Our study shows that even during the briefest interactions, a person's speech patterns shape the way people perceive them, including assessing their competence and fitness for a job," said Michael Kraus, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. "While most hiring managers would deny that a job candidate's social class matters, in reality, the socioeconomic position of an applicant or their parents is being assessed within the first seconds they speak -- a circumstance that limits economic mobility and perpetuates inequality."
[...] "We rarely talk explicitly about social class, and yet, people with hiring experience infer competence and fitness based on socioeconomic position estimated from a few second of an applicant's speech," Kraus said. "If we want to move to a more equitable society, then we must contend with these ingrained psychological processes that drive our early impressions of others. Despite what these hiring tendencies may suggest, talent is not found solely among those born to rich or well-educated families. Policies that actively recruit candidates from all levels of status in society are best positioned to match opportunities to the people best suited for them."
Journal Reference:
Michael W. Kraus et al. Evidence for the reproduction of social class in brief speech[$]. PNAS, 2019 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1900500116
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @04:32PM (6 children)
I have a simple question for you. Would you expect the wealth equality within nations to be higher in those with a greater standard deviation, or a lower standard deviation* in IQ scores? Isn't it then somewhat expected, even in a perfect meritocracy, for their to be increasing income inequality alongside increasing diversity? We should even be able to test this theory now. Sweden is rapidly becoming much less homogeneous and so their distribution of IQs is going to shift similarly rapidly. If I'm correct we'd expect to see increasing income inequality within one of the most egalitarian and liberally embracing nations in the world.
Indeed in looking up the data (and I suppose you'll just have to trust I didn't know this before hand - for what it's worth I swear I did not) Sweden's income inequality growth between "between 1985 and the early 2010s was the largest among all OECD countries, increasing by one third." [source] [wikipedia.org] We should expect to see that number creep higher, a hyper-generous welfare state notwithstanding. Indeed I think future data should be even more informative since I'd readily acknowledge that even if I was wrong, you'd probably see a boost in at least short-term inequality due to the fact that most migrants are dirt poor and uneducated. That said, Sweden's generous welfare state does offer some substantial mitigation against this.
But ultimately I would hypothesize that even with substantial wealth redistribution you would never see anything like wealth equality in diverse nations since those on the higher end of distributions would always skirt away from those on the lower, once an equilibrium is reached. So you end up having to distribute more to reach a new equilibrium and the process once again repeats itself. E.g. - see in the United States how poverty is not meaningfully changing over the decades even though we now are spending tens of billions of dollars on programs that not that long ago did not even exist. Lots of money, but no real change. If people were all mostly equal and all they needed was a helping hand and fair shake to help them get things in order, then these programs ought be having a much more positive impact than they have.
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* - This is a bit of a poorly phrased question since IQ is itself is measured as a relativistic measure with 100 always being the mean and with 15 always being the standard deviation. All an IQ of 115 means is that you score better than 84% of other people in the sample - it's meaningless in a vacuum. But I think the meaning of my question is clear enough. E.g. - would the nation with 5 5 5 5 5 IQ have greater, lesser, or the same income inequality as a nation with IQs of 1 1 1 9 9.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 25 2019, @07:10PM (2 children)
Perhaps that is true, for some arbitrary definition of "poverty". The facts, however, indicate that few if any children go to bed hungry in the United States today. I have actually read of a couple cases where children died of malnutrition or starvation, in recent years. But, those children also suffered pretty horrible physical abuse before they died. That is, those children were starved to death by hateful parents and/or guardians.
If you can identify some town, county, or city in the US that regularly buries people starved to death, then I'll have to reconsider this post. Unless you can offer such citations, then I'll insist that the US is extremely wealthy, and that our poor has little to complain of. I've been in cities in this world, where the desparate jump into the dumpsters to get at the food that we threw away. I don't see that in the US. Here, dumpster divers are after retail store discards, like computers and computer components that didn't sell, or last year's fashions that didn't sell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @08:44PM (1 child)
Sure, but all nations are improving. Holding our system up to the worst possible places on Earth for those in poverty and calling it a success makes a failure pretty much impossible. The modern food stamp program didn't even exist until the mid 60s. Suffice to say we weren't having carts drive by asking folks to bring out their dead then either.
But maybe the big boys are where things get really interesting. Medicare/medicaid/social security are absolutely huge programs. Our spending on those programs alone is going to be hitting $2.8 trillion in 2020. That spending is more than the GDP of all but 5 countries. For instance it's more than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom! I mean think about what that means. With our spending on just those 3 programs, you have the entire sum of all money generated in a year in the entirety of the United Kingdom - England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
If you go back in time just several decades and told people that we'd be spending more on our social programs than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom, which is a quite well developed region in its own right. What would they expect the standard of living for the poor to be like? Probably something somewhat nicer than 'well, they don't immediately jump into a dumpster when I throw out my food'! I'm not even saying these programs are bad (definitely not saying they're good either - but that's another topic). But rather that you're never going to have lasting equality when people are not identical. And the more diverse a people you have, the more inequality you're going to have.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:38AM
And, that is the ultimate answer to socialists.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 25 2019, @08:55PM (2 children)
Your question is a fine one, but note I posted data on social mobility, i.e. social correlation between parents and children. I didn't post social equality, i.e. income parity within the same generation.
The point is, one hindrance to social mobility is that people who grow up with a poor person's accent can't get a good job because of their accent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:29PM (1 child)
It's the same story:
- In a perfect meritocracy where all group distributions are identical, social mobility is going to be essentially a crap shoot. Since all group aggregates are equal, whoever advances would essentially be random and so social mobility would be high.
- In a perfect meritocracy where group distributions differ, it's no longer a crap shoot. Because now one group would have substantially higher rates of social mobility than other groups due to differing aggregate distributions. Lower performing groups would have more difficulty moving up, and be more likely to move back down in the uncommon cases where they did manage to move up. By contrast groups with more favorable distributions would be moving up much more frequently and be more likely to stay up. And this would be a persistent effect through generations which would begin to show a reduced social mobility.
And indeed this is exactly the case in America. Different groups have somewhat radically different rates [priceonomics.com] of social mobility. It only gave the typical black and white comparison, but you will find the identical thing regardless of which group you look at. For those who have higher aggregate IQ distributions, you find higher social mobility. For those with lower IQ distributions, you find lower social mobility. Of course the difficulty is trying to discern between environmental effects and different relative distributions of merit (by whatever metric you want - IQ being the easiest). But I think one interesting datum, mentioned in that article, is that groups with less favorable distributions not only have more difficulty 'lifting themselves up' but also tend to fall back down disproportionately often once they reach the highest economic tiers of society. In today's world of normalized usury and insurance for everything, going from rich to not-rich is 100% the fault of the individual.
I think if more folks considered this we could actually start achieving greater an overall more egalitarian and fair society. Instead people worship a provably false tabula rasa ideology that, in my opinion, does nothing but hurt the folks adherents tend to think they're helping.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday October 28 2019, @09:12AM
This is a fine argument, and was the one put forward by the British nobility for many generations (I am a Brit). When the system was broken down by the collapse of empire and the Labour movement in early 20th century, it turned out that the influence of genetic factors was rather overstated.
> going from rich to not-rich is 100% the fault of the individual.
It's an interesting argument. I wonder if the social science types have ever looked at negative mobility (i.e. losing money) separately to positive mobility (i.e. gaining money).