disciminating discrimination

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Should the Government Be Targeting a Different Kind of Discrimination?

For example, one field experiment examined discrimination against disabled people in the context of car repairs, finding that disabled customers received higher quotes than the non-disabled customers. ... In a second field experiment, the authors instructed participants to say the phrase, “I’m getting a few price quotes.” This significantly changed outcomes — disabled participants received much lower offers: “Importantly, the lower offers received by disabled testers after signaling a willingness to search are not statistically different from those received by the abled,” write the authors. “In fact, the disabled now receive slightly lower price quotes.”

I believe people should consider this study very carefully, as it might upset your usual notions of discrimination. I think it shows fairly effectively (or at least is a good start) that discrimination is not always about your physical appearance, but that how you present yourself in an interaction is at least as important. I would say that this also agrees with the observation that people can be "racist", but have "black friends", as their issue may actually be with the way people are acting, but they have it conflated with some physical attribute simply out of lack of analysis.