Couples write to you, qualifications included, requesting that you give them access to scarce social housing.
Would you be completely unbiased in your evaluation of their request, choosing one over others to become next in line for a home they might actually be able to afford?
Quite probably you would affirm — and believe — your lack of bias, evaluating couple after couple in the fairest possible way.
But what proof is there of your self-evaluation of fairness? Quite likely you’ve never been tested for bias. With the responsibility of assigning access to housing to those most-in-need/most-deserving, being fair would seem to be an essential skill.
But who, when aware of their responsibility to be fair, could resist polishing up their capabilities, displaying them in the best possible light? A recent study was designed to skirt around the awareness issue.
Fairness is deemed essential in Sweden, where there are more applicants than social housing units. And Sweden is not alone. Other countries might similarly be looking for ways to test for bias.
The researchers ‘scrubbed’ specific qualities of couples from selected applications and submitted them in their scrubbed state1.
In the Swedish study, the concern was that people evaluating the applications were considering the ethnic background of the applicants to either advance or retard their suitability for social housing.
Read at least the Abstract of the following report — a clear and concise explanation of how the experiment was performed — to evaluate the possibility of bias by an entire cadre of evaluators who were unaware they were being tested. It is published in Housing Studies: A field experiment on ethnic bias in public housing practices in Sweden
Footnotes
- For more about why a study like this is needed, here is an article about unconscious bias in Scribbr: What Is Unconscious Bias? | Definition & Examples
