Testing for racial bias using inconsistent perceptions of race.

Abstract

Tests for racial bias commonly assess whether two people of different races are treated differently. A fundamental challenge is that, because two people may differ in many ways, factors besides race might explain differences in treatment. Here, we propose a test for bias that circumvents the difficulty of comparing two people by instead assessing whether the same person is treated differently when their race is perceived differently. We apply our method to test for bias in police traffic stops, finding that the same driver is likelier to be searched or arrested by police when they are perceived as Hispanic than when they are perceived as white. Our test is broadly applicable to other datasets where race, gender, or other identity data are perceived rather than self-reported, and the same person is observed multiple times.