Demographic In-Group Preference

Olivia’s job market paper A Classroom Observer Like Me shows that if a teacher’s rater is the same demographic as the teacher, they tend to give higher ratings. Classic in-group bias that shows we should take ratings of teachers with a grain of salt.

My cousin Phanish’s friend and former student once came to a barbecue Phanish was hosting - we got to talking and Phanish mentioned that Reddi worked on a paper predicting the success of companies based on the kinship ties of the founding team.

These two papers seem like they’re covering a similar topic - it’s not just who you know, but who you are, and how close you are to the people around you that determines your success in an organization. The talented Nicky Case made a fantastic visualization and playable simulation series around this idea called the Parable of the Polygons.

In-group preference is somewhat baked into us and predictable from things like selfish gene theory, but so is the desire for novelty. Some research has been done into the power of diverse teams - specifically that teams which bond over facts, and not some social identity, tend to produce more rational results. Of course, irrational groups tend to survive apocalypses much better than you might think.

I can imagine a scenario where systems with strong demographic in-group preference outperform those that don’t have it, because measuring the individual merit of a teacher accurately isn’t actually all that important - compliance of teachers within the hierarchy of the education system might be far more important. When the curriculum changes, do you have discord or concord? Curriculum level improvements in education then might be more impactful than improving the quality of teachers. Fascinating stuff that I’ll have to bring up with Olivia when we next chat.

What I love most about research like this is it reveals and validates how small, unobservable personal biases might bubble up into a biased system and a feeling of exclusion for certain groups. Unfortunately, it’s only academics who end up actually believing these studies, with the mainstream getting polluted with all sorts of other interests beyond science.