The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (19 page)

Our next secret agent was Tyrone, a twenty-year-old black man wearing a hoodie and low-slung, baggy jeans. Tyrone politely stopped another middle-aged white woman and asked for directions. Without stopping, she responded, “Um, I don’t know.” When Tyrone asked for directions from a businessman in his thirties, the respondent gave him a long look—and then the wrong directions.

In our experiment, we wanted to find out what kinds of reactions people of different ages, genders, and races would receive when they asked for directions. Does discrimination affect people’s willingness to help? How would a passerby react when a gentle middle-aged white lady asked for directions to the tower? How might he or she respond to a young black man? A young white woman? A young white man? An older black man? And so on.

We asked people of different ages, genders and races to help us, as you can see in the chart below. What did our experiments reveal? How often did each “secret agent” receive a helpful response? How long did it take, on average, before the helper moved on?

The numbers in the chart tell an interesting story: if you are looking for directions and happen to be a female, chances are you’ll receive the help you need, especially if you are young. If you’re an older black
male, you’ll receive slightly more help than you will if you are an older white male. But if you are a young black male, you should probably carry a GPS. Young black males were less likely to receive help than young women of either race (who received the most help), middle-aged people (male or female) of either race and young white men.

You might assume that people who didn’t stop to help the young black man were indulging in racism, and in some cases, you’d be right. However, the data showed that older black men and women, and young black women, received helpful directions, so animus against black people in general can’t explain the data. If you are generally willing to help black people find their way, but you perceive this particular young black man as somehow threatening, we would consider that economic discrimination.

The incentive to ignore Tyrone was not based on hatred—rather, it was based on fear and the desire for self-preservation. Fear of Tyrone could be rooted in a fear of criminality, as unfortunately, criminal rates are higher among young black males than other groups. By the same logic, we’re guessing that if we had put a young white male who had a shaved head, jackboots, and a swastika tattoo on the same street corner, passersby would have walked away from him with all speed.

To check this conclusion, we decided to insert an economic signal into the mix. We sent Tyrone and other young black men like him out again, but this time they were dressed in business suits. If the response to them sprang from animus, we surmised, the young men would continue to receive poor treatment. On the other hand, their attire might signal to passersby that they were “safe,” and so they would be given good directions.

Indeed, this time, the young black men were treated quite well and received the same quality information the young women had received. The conclusion is then clear, even if we don’t like it. If you are white, the way you dress is less important than if you are
black. If you are a young black man, one way to reduce discrimination against you is to dress up.

This finding is obviously controversial. When an unarmed young black teenager named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in a gated Florida community in 2012 by a half-white, half-Hispanic neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman, Martin was wearing a hoodie—something Fox TV commentator Geraldo Rivera believed contributed to the young man’s death. “I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies,” Rivera said on
Fox & Friends
. “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”
¹²

Rivera’s comment drew—rightly, in our opinion—outraged protests from those who believed that the talk-show host was blaming the victim. He appeared to be suggesting that dark-skinned individuals who choose to wear hoodies can easily be perceived by others as “gangstas” and a threat to society. But
did
the combination of Martin’s race and choice of clothes contribute to his death? Rivera seemed to be saying as much. And, unfortunately, our study on the streets of Chicago seemed to show that clothing did, in fact, make a big difference in the way the young black men were treated.

Here’s what Martin’s father noted when Rivera apologized to him: “Let me just add one thing with the wearing of the hoodie. I don’t think America knows that, in fact, at the time of the incident when he initially made the call, it was raining. So Trayvon had every right to have on his hood. He was protecting himself from the rain. So if . . . walking in the rain with your hoodie on is a crime, then I guess the world is doing something wrong.”

Allow us to put this into a broader perspective. A hundred years ago, horrible events like Trayvon Martin’s shooting would hardly have made local news in the “white man’s world” of the Jim Crow South. But fifty years ago, in 1963, the shooting of the activist
Medgar Evers lit a fire under the civil rights movement, bringing people of all colors together in a fight for justice for all. Today, the shooting of a single unarmed teenager raises another firestorm, as it should, and it once more brings people of all races together to call for justice. And it shows how our more tolerant society—something so many have fought and died for—can easily shift in the reverse direction.

On the basis of our experiment on the streets of Chicago, we would argue that animus and racism have, for the most part, evolved into economic discrimination, which is much more subtle. But sometimes, animus and racism can combine with economic discrimination in ways that have terrible consequences.

Joe the Wheelchair Man

So far, our field experiments have teased out one distinction between economic discrimination and animus: the former is based on “looking out for number one,” while the latter is based on hatred of the “other.” But we wanted to push our demonstration further. We decided to look at another kind of differential treatment, this time against disabled people.

Imagine you are confined to a wheelchair. You’ve lost the use of both your legs, due to an early childhood disease. It’s 6:30
A.M
. and −20°F on a January day in Chicago. You—let’s call you “Joe”—live on the seventh floor of an apartment building in downtown Chicago. You press the off button on your alarm clock and then, working patiently and using your arms, you push your covers off, pull the underwear and pants you have put at the foot of the bed over your hips, and, finally, your socks onto your feet. This effort tires you out, so you wait a few minutes to recover your strength. Then, rocking your hips from side to side, you roll yourself out of bed, letting your legs drop to the floor.

With a mighty effort, you hoist yourself onto your powered wheelchair. After you inhale a quick breakfast (orange juice, coffee from the auto-timed pot, and a muffin), you wheel yourself out of your apartment and take the elevator to the ground floor. The walkway and parking lot have been cleared of snow, but they are frosted with slippery ice. Tentatively, you maneuver your wheelchair toward your dented, specially equipped van.

Using buttons on your keychain, you command the side doors of the van to open and present you with a small lift. After maneuvering your wheelchair onto the lift and into the van, you swivel it into the driver’s spot and insert your key. Taking careful grasp of the hand controls, you maneuver the van out of the parking spot, through the lot, and onto the street.

After a fifteen-minute drive, you pull into “Guy’s Auto Body,” one of the shops you have found with a designated handicapped parking space. You lower the lift on your van and try to push your way through the uncleared snow and onto the wheelchair ramp. The ice forces you to struggle, but you press on. Eventually you make your way to the top of the ramp and tap on the door of the repair shop.

If this sequence of events is painstaking to read, think about what it’s like for millions of disabled people who expend much more energy taking care of daily tasks than able-bodied people can possibly imagine.

Only a handful of studies have looked into discrimination against the disabled—which is a little surprising, given the fact that as the number of elderly people rises around the world, so does the number of people with disabilities. Joe, of course, was our secret agent. For him, every errand is a battle. Even after he struggles to get his van to the repair shop, he faces the challenge of getting a ride home, because many taxis can’t accommodate wheelchairs.

How many price quotes do you think Joe would get for repairing his car? Would he drive from one shop to another, looking for the
best deal? Or would he be forced to settle on the first quote for the sake of much-needed convenience?

When you go to an auto repair shop, you usually don’t know what the work will cost (unless you’re getting some routine work done, such as an oil change or a smog check). The people at the shop base their estimates on the level of work needed, as well as their own discretion. For this field study, we asked several men between the ages of twenty-nine and forty-five to act as our secret agents. Half of these men were like Joe—they used wheelchairs and drove specially equipped vehicles. We sent all of them to get price quotes to fix different cars. In half the cases, the disabled men drove into the body shop asking for a quote. In the other half, the able-bodied men did the same thing with the exact same vehicles.

On average, the disabled men received price quotes that were 30 percent higher than the able-bodied men. Ouch. But why?

For an answer, put yourself in the shoes of the person behind the counter in the mechanic shop. You see Joe wheeling into the office. The dialogue goes something like this:

       
Y
OU
: Hello! Cold out there this morning!

       
J
OE
: (grunts) Right. My van needs some work. It’s out there (pointing). Can you give me an estimate?

       
Y
OU
: (eyeing Joe) Well, we’re pretty busy, but I’ll ask them to take a look as soon as they can.

       
J
OE
: That’s okay. I’ll wait.

While Joe rolls his chair into the waiting area, you are making a mental calculation. You feel sorry for him, understanding that it must have taken quite an effort to get to your shop. Joe clearly needs a break. On the other hand, what are the chances Joe would go to all this trouble to drive to another repair shop for an estimate?

Half an hour later, the repair folks call you with a time and cost estimate about the work. You tell Joe it will cost $1,415. That’s 30 percent more than you would charge an able-bodied person. In fact, doing a similar exercise dozens of times with our testers visiting mechanics reveals the data pattern we discussed above:
the disabled, on average, receive price quotes about 30 percent higher than the nondisabled
.

Are you, the mechanic, reacting to incentives, or do you just dislike helping, and serving, disabled people? Our intuition was that the mechanic recognized that he had a captive customer. Joe had to go to a lot of trouble to get his van repaired, so the mechanic decided to charge him more because he assumed that Joe wouldn’t go through the hassle of collecting another price quote. In other words, the mechanic thought he could charge more and get away with it when he was dealing with a disabled person.

To test our intuition, we sent an entirely new group of testers out for price quotes. This time, we had both the disabled and abled testers mention seven simple words:

“I am getting three price quotes today.”

Guess what happened?

This time around, both the disabled and the abled testers received
identical
offers. So the case was closed. The mechanics were making a simple economic calculation. By propping up their sales in this way, they were engaging in classic, blatantly unfair, economic discrimination by taking advantage of the customer’s disability. The mechanics were reacting to the incentives they were facing—in this case, the opportunity to make more money.