Study sees racial bias in calling fouls

[teamdonkey]

Barkley just commented on this in the pregame show. I love the guy, but he isn't exactly a brain surgeon.

[AngusThermopyle]

[ QUOTE ]
“Across all of these specifications,” they write, “we find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”

[/ QUOTE ]

So, if a player were black, he would be called for one more foul every 8 games (low end of range plus fact he would not play 48 minutes) if all 8 were officiated by all white crews rather than all black crews.

3% of the officiating crews are all black in the study. To have a player have 8 games officiated by all black crews, it would take 3 seasons.

And, don't they keep crews together through a season?

Some thoughts.

[wonderwes]

[Max Raker]

[ QUOTE ]
I haven't read the report yet. Kiki Vanderwhatever (I HATE him as an analyst) just said that they did the study based on the box scores. Is that true? How do they know which ref made which call? Did they just do some mathematical assumptions?

Barkley called the study BS, but unfortunately used the "more black players" argument. Still, when Barkley is defending white people, take heed.

[/ QUOTE ]


I don't understand the more black players argument. Do they really think the study just added the total number of fouls for each race and said that the black players had more?

[wade17]

i call bs on this

[Silent A]

OK, just to clear things up for all those who haven't looked at the actual paper ...

The study finds that whites are charged with more fouls (in terms of fouls per 48 minutes played) than blacks, not less. The paper attributes this to white players being taller, heavier, and much more likely (by three times) to play centre.

It finds no difference in the foul rate of black players when they're reffereed by mostly white or black crews. In fact, the foul rate by black players drops when you have more white refs (but only slightly).

There is a significant increase in foul rate of white players are reffereed by black crews rather than white. Again, the foul rate drops as you add more white refs, but it drops 10 times faster than it does for black players.

The study finds that the difference between the black and white player foul rate drops as you add more white refs.

Maybe it's just me, but the most obvious way to interpret these results is to say that black refs are biased towards calling extra fouls on whites. But the paper's language instead refers to this as a decrease in foul rate when white players have white ref crews.

[Wynton]

I applaud those who actually took the time to read the report. As I said in the original post, my initial reaction was skepticism too: it just doesn't seem likely that the study could have taken into account all the myriad factors. But the more you read, the more you realize how many factors were actually considered.

Having said that, I'm not ready to conclude the study is valid or invalid. I just think it's ridiculous to dismiss the findings outright, as so many (here and in the media) are doing, without actually bothering to read the damn thing.

[Silent A]

I should further clarify that the authors say that the primary effect of any bias appears to effect mostly white players but that their analysis is incapable of determining if white refs are being favourable to white players or if black refs are discriminating against whites.

Another interesting result is that teams with more white players than the NBA average have a better points for-against differential with white ref crews and teams with more black players than average do better with black ref crews.

Also, 3 white/0 black crews show similar results to 2 white/1 black crews. The big changes start to occur when you go to 1 white/2 black and then 0 white/3 black.

Again, the study is incapable of identifying which group is being biased (white or black refs) because they have no way of identifying a "no-discrimination" baseline. But they've done a good job of identifying that a bias does exist.

[MyTurn2Raise]

lots of reactions to this as I'm just finding out.

I did read the study and understand it. For those that don't know, I was a PhD student in accounting and spent quite a bit of time reading studies just like this one - both in topic and statistical methods used.

Some made fun of a guy doing thesis work and such on this. It's actually a great field--racial discrimination in an environment with strong monitoring and feedback that has a rich supply of data. Good luck finding much better spots.

work looks solid--they've controlled for nearly everything any of the silly pundits who have no basis in statistics have said on tv.

I'm surprised there is this much of a backlash. I thought it was common sense that officials were racist among other things. I'm actually a bit surprised the effect was as low as the study showed, although it is still a material effect.

I do wish the authors had explored whether players responded 'strategicly' more. They did show that they don't respond 'oppositionally,' but where is the same treatment of stats for Strategic.

Horrible of the NYTimes to release this while it is still a working paper. A paper needs to go through peer review and be admitted to a major journal. The work looks good from my review, but a stamp from the 3 or so out of 15 people in the world that would be best to evaluate that speaks volumes. If you are not in academia, it's tough to explain the long and arduous process of going from a working paper to a published article. I never got near that far in my own studies, but my roommate just got a major publication hit. I am familiar with the process.


if they (the authors) were just looking for results that didn't generalize to external environments, they could look at calls for the home team, especially in the last 10 minutes of a contested affair.



There is NO incentive for the authors to show racial bias. The beauty of their whole study is that the results are interesting whether there is a bias or not. If there is NO bias, they could still publish the work as it shows that a highly monitored environment with feedback can mitigate racial discrimination.


What does concern me, as a fan, most about what I've heard so far is:
1) the NBA's flat out rejection
2) the pregame meeting of officials--
this is just horrible as it predisposes officials and biases their thinking throughout a game (not talking race here, just in general). For instance, if the meeting covers such and such team playing more aggressive of late, officials will definitely see the game through a much different lens.





None of this is surprising in the least. Human beings are very far from being objective automatons. VERY FAR

[kidcolin]

pretty cool take on the study:

http://www.basketbloom.net/2007/05/w...-is-bogus.html