In-group judicial favoritism can cancel out in aggregate and hide overall racial bias.

Evidence

As discussed in this chapter, there is credible evidence that if judges and defendants share the same racial or ethnic identity, this will have an impact on case outcomes. This also means that this “in-group bias” may mask the overall racial bias. In other words, the analysis of judicial decisions may reveal no bias, but this “nil result” could be an artifact of judges of different racial groups treating the members of their in-group favorably and these subgroup biases canceling each other in the aggregate. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 782

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The perverse insight that a nil result in bias research can itself be an artifact of countervailing biases is a genuinely paradigm-shifting methodological point worth sitting with.
• SEED: Essay angle: how neutrality statistics can be composed of mirror-image biases that mask each other — a lesson that extends well beyond courts.
• XREF: connects to: A judicial system can apply one restriction to minorities while exempting the majority — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 256