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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
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) 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).