Are Americans less likely to reply to emails from Black people relative to White people?

Abstract

In this article, we present the results from a large-scale field experiment designed to measure racial discrimination among the American public. We conducted an audit study on the general public-sending correspondence to 250,000 citizens randomly drawn from public voter registration lists. Our within-subjects experimental design tested the public's responsiveness to electronically delivered requests to volunteer their time to help with completing a simple task-taking a survey. We randomized whether the request came from either an ostensibly Black or an ostensibly White sender. We provide evidence that in electronic interactions, on average, the public is less likely to respond to emails from people they believe to be Black (rather than White). Our results give us a snapshot of a subtle form of racial bias that is systemic in the United States. What we term everyday or "paper cut" discrimination is exhibited by all racial/ethnic subgroups-outside of Black people themselves-and is present in all geographic regions in the United States. We benchmark paper cut discrimination among the public to estimates of discrimination among various groups of social elites. We show that discrimination among the public occurs more frequently than discrimination observed among elected officials and discrimination in higher education and the medical sector but simultaneously, less frequently than discrimination in housing and employment contexts. Our results provide a window into the discrimination that Black people in the United States face in day-to-day interactions with their fellow citizens.

Keywords: audit study; discrimination against African Americans; racial bias.

Fig. 1.

Discrimination against Black people compared with White people by the public and elected representatives. Left displays the effect of an African American sender (vs. a White sender) on response rates of the public and of their elected officials. Effects listed here are within subjects and as such, include individual fixed effects. Effects are scaled relative to the mean response rate in the control group (i.e., they are in percentage of the base rate units). N (public) = 500,000; N (elected officials) = 81,024. The distributions in Right show results from permutation tests that randomly shuffle the data 1,000 times and estimate a treatment effect for each random draw. For the sake of computation time, individual fixed effects are omitted in the permutations. The reference lines show the observed effects, with labels for the number of permutation draws as extreme also labeled. In both panels, green indicates elected officials, and purple indicates the public. The public discriminates against Black people, and although discrimination among the public may be slightly larger, elected officials’ discrimination is (statistically) a mirror image of the public’s discrimination.

Fig. 2.

Discrimination effects among the US public broken by recipient race. The effect of an African American sender (vs. a White sender) on response rates of the public. Points are coefficients (sized by N), and bars are the respective 90% (thicker) and 95% (thinner) CIs. Effects listed here include individual fixed effects. Effects are scaled relative to the mean response rate in the control group (i.e., they are in percentage of the base rate units). Public: N(ALL) = 500,000; N(W) = 352,632; N(B) = 55,320; N(A) = 14,344; N(H) = 38,650; and N(HAO) = 92,048. The public discriminates against Black people. This is driven by Whites and other non-Black respondents; Black people do not discriminate against Black senders.

Fig. 3.

Discrimination among the public is driven by Republicans and Independents. The figure displays the effect of an African American sender (vs. a White sender) on response rates of the public among various partisan/racial subgroups. Points are coefficients (sized by N), and bars are the respective 90% (thicker) and 95% (thinner) CIs. Effects are scaled relative to the mean response rate in the control group (i.e., they are in percentage of the base rate units). Discrimination among the public is driven primarily by Republicans and Independents. Discrimination is larger for White Democrats than Black Democrats (SI Appendix, Fig. S27).

Fig. 4.

Paper cut discrimination by the public and elected officials across the United States. (A) Paper cut discrimination among the public. (B) Paper cut discrimination among politicians. (C) Difference between politicians and the public. Discrimination effect estimates by state. For the maps in A and B, darker colors correspond to higher levels of discrimination against Black people. In the map in C, purple states are where elected officials discriminate more than the public, and in green states, the public discriminates more than elected officials. Paper cut discrimination is systemic, and the modal state exhibits no difference between elected officials’ and citizens’ behaviors (SI Appendix, Fig. S18).