Is there a book consisting of abstracts of published papers about prejudice, bias, discrimination, and the like?
For example, there are studies in which researchers send out resumes that are identical except for having names that sound male versus female, or white versus black, and discover that the rates of interview offers change as a result.
Or for example studies of symphony orchestras before and after they conducted their auditions blind, so that the gender of the musician was not known to the panel. They find that women were usually found inferior to men before their gender was hidden, but once gender is hidden the difference vanished.
I have lots of books that mention such studies by way of making a point, but it takes a great while to accumulate a few references by reading in the hope that somebody will cite one. And, often, they don’t provide reference information, they just refer to “a study”.
I didn’t find a single example of what I want on Amazon using the search strategies I did (although I did learn that, apparently, rewritten alternative versions of “Pride and Prejudice” are some new kind of literary form I’d never heard of).
Here is an example one kind of thing I can easily find: obviously the studies are of interest, but everything is anonymous and so doesn’t carry as much weight. I’d like to find a sourcebook of items like this, but more traditionally cited and referenced, so I can get the original papers easily:
■ When doctors were shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients — even when their medical files were statistically identical to those of white patients.
■ When whites and blacks were sent to bargain for a used car, blacks were offered initial prices roughly $700 higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
■ Several studies found that sending emails with stereotypically black names in response to apartment-rental ads on Craigslist elicited fewer responses than sending ones with white names. A regularly repeated study by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development sent African-Americans and whites to look at apartments and found that African-Americans were shown fewer apartments to rent and houses for sale.
■ White state legislators were found to be less likely to respond to constituents with African-American names. This was true of legislators in both political parties.
■ Emails sent to faculty members at universities, asking to talk about research opportunities, were more likely to get a reply if a stereotypically white name was used.
■ Even eBayauctions were not immune. When iPods were auctioned on eBay, researchers randomly varied the skin color on the hand holding the iPod. A white hand holding the iPod received 21 percent more offers than a black hand.
Outside my field of expertise, but the firt thing I’d try is to use Google Scholar.
If you know the names of some of the authors of those studies you are interested in, enter these into the searchbox, along with a few key words from the title of the papers , say ‘Abbot Costello First Base’. The search results will usually give you the specific article or work first, then other articles which are related in various ways.
Below each search result it will say ‘Cited by XX’ and ‘Related articles’. The first will give you a list of works that have specifically referenced that Abbot and Costello paper, while the other chases different types of connections.
Each search result MAY include a link to a PDF or a website. There are other search engines that do a much better job of finding specific PDFs, but it helps to do the leg-work and get correct dates, titles and citations beforehand. Even if it doesn’t and the link goes to an academic journal behind a paywall, usually the paper abstract and often the bibliography are still readily accessible.
Given that only you know what may or may not be relevant, you can then scissor and paste the abstracts to your heart’s content.
I’d stay clear of Amazon for this. Its not quite useless, but pretty close.