MAY 6 | Scale Dichotomization Reduces Customer Racial Discrimination and Income Inequality
MAY 6 | Scale Dichotomization Reduces Customer Racial Discrimination and Income Inequality
Tuesday, May 6, 202512:40 PM - 2:00 PM (Pacific)
Stanford Law School Building, Manning Faculty Lounge (Room 270)
559 Nathan Abbott Way Stanford, CA 94305
Join the Cyber Policy Center on May 6th from 1PM–2PM Pacific for Scale Dichotomization Reduces Customer Racial Discrimination and Income Inequality, with Katy DeCelles, a 2024-2025 Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. It will be moderated by Jeff Hancock.
Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar. The Spring Seminar Series continues through the end of May; see our Spring Seminar Series page for speakers and topics.
About the Seminar:
Dr. DeCelles will present three studies from her collaborative work recently published in Nature. This research examines racial discrimination in online platforms. Online platforms are rife with racial discrimination but current interventions focus on employers rather than customers. We propose a customer-facing solution: changing to a two-point rating scale (dichotomization). Compared with the ubiquitous five-star scale, we argue that dichotomization reduces modern racial discrimination by focusing evaluators on the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performance, thereby reducing how personal beliefs shape customer assessments. Our research offers a promising intervention for reducing customers’ subtle racial discrimination in a large section of the economy and contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on evaluation processes and racial inequality.
About the Speaker:
Katherine (Katy) DeCelles holds the Secretary of State Professorship of Organizational Effectiveness at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and is the VMware Women’s Leadership Lab Fellow. DeCelles plans to use her time at CASBS focused on designing effective randomized control interventions that leverage recent advances in technology to help reduce harmful discrimination occurring in the precarious platform labor market and during high-stakes interactions between police and community members. Her research seeks to understand the psychological mechanisms that explain how individuals and organizations grapple with interpersonal and societal conflict, crime, and various forms of inequality. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to social science that uses experimental, archival, video and qualitative methods, and she is known for her research on conflict in extreme contexts such as in prisons, airplanes, protests, and robbery.