In-group bias research is stalled by scarce balanced race-matched data

Evidence

Despite its importance, there is very limited research on in-group bias in judicial decisions. Potential reasons for this include the difficulty of finding suitable data sets. To do such analyses, one needs to have access to data with sensitive information about cases, including the race/ethnicity of both the defendant and the judge. Furthermore, there needs to be enough variation in the race of both defendants and judges for the analysis sample to be able to statistically identify an effect, if it exists. This means that such analysis cannot be performed in situations where either minority defendants or minority judges constitute a small fraction of the cases in the analysis sample. In other words, one needs a detailed data set, a large data set, and a data set that is reasonably well-balanced across these different attributes. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 762

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the social-capital and in-group-favoritism literature from earlier curated chapters on trust and reputation in markets.