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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5438
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, May 06, 2007 - 08:44 am: | 
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May 2, 2007
Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls
By ALAN SCHWARZ
Editors' Note Appended
An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.
A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.
Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”
N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern said in a telephone interview that the league saw a draft copy of the paper last year, and was moved to do its own study this March using its own database of foul calls, which specifies which official called which foul.
“We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias,” Mr. Stern said.
Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound. The N.B.A. denied a request for its underlying data, even with names of officials and players removed, because it feared that the league’s confidentiality agreement with referees could be violated if the identities were determined through box scores.
The paper by Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price has yet to undergo formal peer review before publication in an economic journal, but several prominent academic economists said it would contribute to the growing literature regarding subconscious racism in the workplace and elsewhere, such as in searches by the police.
The three experts who examined the Wolfers-Price paper and the N.B.A.’s materials were Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions ranging from the setting of bail amounts to the tipping of taxi drivers; David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield, the author of “The Wages of Wins,” which analyzes sports issues using statistics; and Larry Katz of Harvard University, the senior editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”
Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”
To investigate whether such bias has existed in sports, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined data from publicly available box scores. They accounted for factors like the players’ positions, playing time and All-Star status; each group’s time on the court (black players played 83 percent of minutes, while 68 percent of officials were white); calls at home games and on the road; and other relevant data.
But they said they continued to find the same phenomenon: that players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a vocal critic of his league’s officiating, said in a telephone interview after reading the paper: “We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.”
Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”
Two veteran players who are African-American, Mike James of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Alan Henderson of the Philadelphia 76ers, each said that they did not think black or white officials had treated them differently.
“If that’s going on, then it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” James said. “But I’ve never seen it.”
Two African-American coaches, Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics and Maurice Cheeks of the Philadelphia 76ers, declined to comment on the paper’s claims. Rod Thorn, the president of the New Jersey Nets and formerly the N.B.A.’s executive vice president for basketball operations, said: “I don’t believe it. I think officials get the vast majority of calls right. They don’t get them all right. The vast majority of our players are black.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price spend 41 pages accounting for such population disparities and more than a dozen other complicating factors.
For the 1991-92 through 2003-4 seasons, the authors analyzed every player’s box-score performance — minutes played, rebounds, shots made and missed, fouls and the like — in the context of the racial composition of the three-person crew refereeing that game. (The N.B.A. did not release its record of calls by specific officials to either Mr. Wolfers, Mr. Price or The Times, claiming it is kept for referee training purposes only.)
Mr. Wolfers said that he and Mr. Price classified each N.B.A. player and referee as either black or not black by assessing photographs and speaking with an anonymous former referee, and then using that information to predict how an official would view the player. About a dozen players could reasonably be placed in either category, but Mr. Wolfers said the classification of those players did not materially change the study’s findings.
During the 13-season period studied, black players played 83 percent of the minutes on the floor. With 68 percent of officials being white, three-person crews were either entirely white (30 percent of the time), had two white officials (47 percent), had two black officials (20 percent) or were entirely black (3 percent).
Mr. Stern said that the race of referees had never been considered when assembling crews for games.
With their database of almost 600,000 foul calls, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price used a common statistical technique called multivariable regression analysis, which can identify correlations between different variables. The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined whether otherwise similar black and white players had fouls-per-minute rates that varied with the racial makeup of the refereeing crew.
“Across all of these specifications,” they write, “we find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price also report a statistically significant correlation with decreases in points, rebounds and assists, and a rise in turnovers, when players performed before primarily opposite-race officials.
“Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees,” they write. The paper later notes no change in free-throw percentage. “We emphasize this result because this is the one on-court behavior that we expect to be unaffected by referee behavior.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price claim that these changes are enough to affect game outcomes. Their results suggested that for each additional black starter a team had, relative to its opponent, a team’s chance of winning would decline from a theoretical 50 percent to 49 percent and so on, a concept mirrored by the game evidence: the team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games — a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.
“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” Mr. Wolfers said.
The N.B.A.’s reciprocal study was conducted by the Segal Company, the actuarial consulting firm which designed the in-house data-collection system the league uses to identify patterns for referee-training purposes, to test for evidence of bias. The league’s study was less formal and detailed than an academic paper, included foul calls for only two and a half seasons (from November 2004 through January 2007), and did not consider differences among players by position, veteran status and the like. But it did have the clear advantage of specifying which of the three referees blew his whistle on each foul.
The N.B.A. study reported no significant differences in how often white and black referees collectively called fouls on white and black players. Mr. Stern said he was therefore convinced “that there’s no demonstration of any bias here — based upon more robust and more data that was available to us because we keep that data.”
Added Joel Litvin, the league’s president for basketball operations, “I think the analysis that we did can stand on its own, so I don’t think our view of some of the things in Wolfers’s paper and some questions we have actually matter as much as the analysis we did.”
Mr. Litvin explained the N.B.A.’s refusal to release its underlying data for independent examination by saying: “Even our teams don’t know the data we collect as to a particular referee’s call tendencies on certain types of calls. There are good reasons for this. It’s proprietary. It’s personnel data at the end of the day.”
The percentage of black officials in the N.B.A. has increased in the past several years, to 38 percent of 60 officials this season from 34 percent of 58 officials two years ago. Mr. Stern and Mr. Litvin said that the rise was coincidental because the league does not consider race in the hiring process.
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price are scheduled to present their paper at the annual meetings of the Society of Labor Economists on Friday and the American Law and Economics Association on Sunday. They will then submit it to the National Bureau of Economic Research and for formal peer review before consideration by an economic journal.
Both men cautioned that the racial discrimination they claim to have found should be interpreted in the context of bias found in other parts of American society.
“There’s bias on the basketball court,” Mr. Wolfers said, “but less than when you’re trying to hail a cab at midnight.”
Pat Borzi contributed reporting from Minneapolis and John Eligon from East Rutherford, N.J.
Editors' Note: May 5, 2007
A front-page article on Wednesday about an academic study that detected a racial bias in the foul calls of referees in the National Basketball Association noted that The New York Times had asked three independent experts to review the study and materials from a subsequent N.B.A. study that detected no bias.
The experts, whose names the authors of the two studies did not learn until after the article was published, all agreed that the study that detected bias was far more sound. That study was conducted by Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics.
After the article was published, The Times learned that one of the three experts, Larry Katz of Harvard University, was the chairman of Mr. Wolfers’s doctoral thesis committee, as Mr. Wolfers had acknowledged in previous studies. Because of this, Mr. Katz should not have been cited as an independent expert.
An updated version of the Wolfers-Price study added acknowledgments for Mr. Katz and a second expert The Times had contacted, David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield. They were thanked for brief “helpful comments” about the paper they made to Mr. Wolfers via e-mail messages after reviewing it for The Times. These later comments would have been mentioned in the article if editors had known about them.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/sports/basketball/02refs.html?bl=&ei=5087%0A&e n=ea4bc6088bb438e7&ex=1178251200&pagewanted=print
Some NBA Players Dismiss Referee Study
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2007/05/06/ap/sports/basketball/d8ospb l80.txt |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5439
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, May 06, 2007 - 08:58 am: |
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A LOT of research is being done on this subconscious racism. Where gonna start hearing plenty about it. From what I've read thus far, it is a VERY very serious issue. It's amazing how much of our lives are affected by it, it is off the charts, truly mind-blowing.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8532
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, May 06, 2007 - 03:23 pm: |
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Charles Barkley and the other black members of the panel who analyse NBA games at half-time on cable channel TNT scoffed at these claims. They did say that in the NBA refs do show favoritism toward championship teams and superstars like Shaq. |
Mzuri
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mzuri
Post Number: 4699
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 07, 2007 - 03:44 am: |
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Who GAF about some millionaire BB players being discriminated against? Get out here and do something about the poor working slobs who can't catch a break because of their skin color!!! Thank you. |
Doberman23
Veteran Poster
Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 993
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 07, 2007 - 08:42 am: |
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i agree with mzuri, that may have been true back in the days but now it's about popularity. lebron james could probably slap another player and not even get suspended (like mike jordan did reggie miller). |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4331
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 07, 2007 - 11:31 am: |
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I am not surprised. |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 2209
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 07, 2007 - 01:42 pm: |
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Who really cares...???? |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5478
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 10, 2007 - 10:44 pm: |
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Discussion of bias needs give and take
Gwen Knapp
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The most intense NBA confrontation of the last week had nothing to do with the Warriors or Mark Cuban or even Steve Nash's copiously bleeding nose. It started with a front-page New York Times story about an academic project that found variations in foul calls based on the racial composition of the officiating crew, putting black players at a slight disadvantage.
The geek world was posting up on the jock world, and the elbows started flying furiously.
Indignant sportswriters, players and ex-players across the racial spectrum insisted that they had not seen a hint of bias and that the two Ivy League authors knew nothing about basketball. NBA Commissioner David Stern took to the airwaves and delivered high-brow trash talk. The league released results of a study it had commissioned, which came to the unsurprising conclusion that the academics were wrong.
With few exceptions, pundits latched onto the NBA's version, because it made what, on the surface, appeared to be good arguments. But that was the problem with the entire debate. People refused to look below the surface. In an era when the most pervasive form of bias also might be the least overt, they saw only what was in front of them and didn't question it.
Taking the league's report at face value, they missed some sloppiness in the first sentence of the summary. The NBA said its researchers examined 3,482 regular-season games from the beginning of the 2004-05 season through January 2007. But, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, only 3,144 games took place between those dates.
An NBA spokesman said Wednesday that data from the study had been updated through March 25, but no one had changed the dates on the media release.
As that missed error suggests, most sports commentators don't have enough understanding of statistical analysis to make a responsible call on these two studies. (In good conscience, we should disqualify ourselves as soon as we spot the word "coefficient.") People blew the whistle anyway, responding with gut instinct rather than healthy curiosity.
They relied on their years of experience around the game to reject the suggestion of racial bias. If it existed, they were sure they would have known better than anyone.
Never mind that the academic study covered 13,326 games in 13 seasons, three times what 44-year-old critic Charles Barkley could have seen if he had watched 100 games a year since birth.
Critics also assumed that the differences in foul calls would have been visible to the naked eye, even though the academics said the variation maxed out at 4 percent. That's their absolute worst-case scenario, the difference between all-white and all-black crews, and it's less than a quarter of one foul per player per game. That's microscopic, harder to spot than a needle in 30 haystacks.
Yet the ripple effects of that tiny, unrecognized variance could influence the outcome of a game. The Ivy League authors -- Penn economics professor Justin Wolfers and Cornell graduate student Joseph Price -- reported that performance statistics for black players declined in games refereed by predominantly white crews, perhaps a subliminal reaction to a virtually invisible bias.
"There are a lot of things in our lives that are hard to see, yet are real," said Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia professor of psychology. "Most beliefs about what germs were in the 18th century said, 'That's ridiculous. How could there be these little tiny animals that make us sick?' So hospitals didn't have good hygiene.
"They didn't know it was relevant. It was only through research, through looking at the data over time, that it became clear that when doctors washed their hands, fewer people died."
Nosek doesn't claim to know whether the NBA referees harbor bias. He hasn't read either study. But he does know a lot about the connection between race and snap judgments, like the ones referees make every game. He and two other researchers have developed a test (see box) that measures subconscious preferences, which appear to be shaped by cultural surroundings, rather than what a person wants and tries to believe. The test on race shows that most people demonstrate a strong preference for white people.
So Nosek wasn't surprised about the referees' study that suggested bias. Neither was his younger brother, Kevin, who works on the opposite side of the geek-jock divide. Kevin played basketball at UC Davis and now coaches the Aggies as an assistant. He is intrigued by the academic report even though, like Barkley, his experience doesn't support its findings.
"As a player and coach, I don't think I have ever seen explicitly or felt explicitly any of that stuff, so I would agree with the players and how they're feeling," he said. "I think as players and coaches, we find plenty of reasons to be mad at the refs, and race isn't one of them."
His brother has educated him about subconscious bias, and Kevin finds it compelling. "I think this is something that we should, as a sport and a culture, look into," he said. "We'd be foolish not to look into it and if the findings are accurate, try to learn how to minimize them."
Likewise, the psychology professor has learned about his brother's job and been surprised by the extraordinary depth of social interaction among coaches and players, the level of understanding they have to achieve before a team can thrive. It goes beyond anything he could imagine.
The Nosek brothers sat down to dinner together last week in Davis, right after the New York Times story appeared. They talked about the refereeing study. They listened to each other. They didn't throw elbows. They felt safe discussing the issues.
Whenever he does public presentations, Brian tries to create the same calm for his audience. He reveals that his own test results frequently show a strong own-race, or pro-white, bias.
"People sort of stop and say 'OK, wait a second. If he's saying that he has these biases, then he's probably not accusing me of being a racist,' " Brian Nosek said. "This isn't that standard old 'Who's prejudiced and who's not?' "
Given time to consider their reactions, people can overcome the subconscious. Even better, though subjects can't talk themselves into a less biased test result, they can change the outcome fairly quickly by absorbing images of high-achieving members of groups that often are presented in a negative light. Watching Colin Powell give a speech and video of Leontyne Price singing an aria can shift views enough to register on the test.
Footage of Michael Jordan has a similar effect, Nosek said.
The NBA has long been a leader in shaping perceptions about race, which makes even the finest points of its operation fascinating. But in the discussion it provoked last week, too many people refused to look beyond what they already believed. They chose sides and vented fear and anger in every possible forum. They'd have been so much better off sitting at the Nosek dinner table.
Are you biased?
The Implicit Association Test examines reaction time in linking positive and negative words with images of different types of people: young and old, black and white, male and female.
To take a version of the test, go to implicit.harvard.edu. People who see themselves as race-blind tend to be disappointed in the results.
In his book "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell described repeating the test, trying to psych himself out of a mental state that consistently revealed a preference for white faces over black ones. He failed.
The most recent online results of the race test show that only 17 percent of participants have neutral reactions. A full 70 percent show a preference for white faces.
Black participants contribute substantially to that 70 percent. According to one of the test's creators, University of Virginia professor Brian Nosek, anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of the black respondents have weighed in as pro-white.
E-mail Gwen Knapp at gknapp@sfchronicle.com.
San Francisco Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/10/SPGQ3PO74L1.DTL
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/10/SPGQ3PO74L1.DTL |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 9358
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 11, 2007 - 01:25 am: |
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If +80% of NBA players are Black, how can some sliver of differences in officiating between White and Black refs have a material effect on Wins/Losses?
It seems to me that, as a whole, whatever biases the White refs have against Black players are going to be minimized by the fact that BOTH teams in any given NBA game are suffering the SAME alleged mistreatment.
Btw: And is there a great, dominant NBA team that has mostly White players? |
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