Database Reference
In-Depth Information
A complete bibliography would be an utopian goal. Our priority is to provide
to interested reader with references to survey, comparison, and overview papers as
well as with recent works on the subject. The chapter is structured as follows. Af-
ter introducing the relevant concepts and references from social and legal perspec-
tives in Section 6.2, we concentrate on the vast research on economic models of
labour discrimination in Section 6.3. The approaches for collecting and analyzing
controlled data using (quasi-)experimental scientific methodologies are presented
in Section 6.4. Section 6.5 discusses discrimination in profiling and scoring, and,
finally, Section 6.6 reports on recent work on using data mining for discrimination
discovery and prevention.
6.2
Sociological and Legal Perspectives
From a sociological perspective, there are three main causes of discrimination: prej-
udice, rational racism, and unintentional discrimination.
Prejudice
leads to discrim-
ination when it concerns unfairly or unreasonably formed negative attitudes against
a protected
1
group. The vicious cycle of discrimination (Newman, 2008) starts from
a situation where prejudice causes a protected group to be socially disadvantaged.
This is interpreted as evidence that the group is inferior, which, in turn, creates re-
newed prejudice by increasing social distance, by reinforcing negative stereotypes,
and by legitimating negative feelings. Psychologists have investigated situations of
anxiety or concerns, called stereotype threats (Steele & Aronson, 1995), where per-
sons have the potential to confirm a negative stereotype of their social group, which
results in reduced performances of individuals.
Rational racism
is the result of ratio-
nal thinking. A form of rational racism is statistical discrimination, occurring when
the lack of knowledge about the skills of an individual is compensated by a prior
knowledge of the average performances of the group or category the individual be-
longs to. Another example of rational thinking occurs when an employer foresee a
negative impact on his business due to the prejudice of his customers against em-
ployers belonging to a protected group. Finally,
unintentional discrimination
occurs
not because of malevolent decisions, but due to the lack of awareness on the ef-
fects of a decision. This is the case of indifference, incorrect (execution of) proce-
dures or practices, lack of planning and analysis of the decision outcomes. Also, a
form of unconscious or implicit discrimination has been considered in the literature
(Bertrand et al., 2005; Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Kang & Banaji, 2010). Together
with the concept of indirect discrimination (see later on), unintentional discrimina-
tion poses considerable problems for the data analyst to carefully take into account
the effects of decisions from the point of view of different protected groups. We
refer to (R. Brown, 2010; Newman, 2008) for a sociological overview of prejudice,
to (Whitley & Kite, 2009) for a psychological discussion
2
, to (Quillian, 2006) for a
1
We use the term “protected group” for any social group protected by anti-discrimination
laws.
2
See http://www.understandingprejudice.org for links to prejudice-related resources.
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