NBA Ref Racial Bias Redux

A few years ago, Wharton economist and Freakonomics contributor Justin Wolfers, along with co-author Joseph Price, published a paper alleging implicit bias among NBA referees. The paper kicked up a strong controversy, prompting fierce denials from the NBA. With this month’s publication of the paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Henry Abbott revisits both the paper’s conclusions and the NBA’s response. “If you think about how Jackie Robinson was treated; we don’t treat black players like that anymore,” says Price. “We’ve gotten rid of a lot of those issues. We’ve gotten rid of explicit racial bias. But what’s potentially harder to get rid of is the implicit stereotypes that we all carry inside.” [%comments]