Racial Discrimination in Seeking Advice

Abstract

We study racial discrimination against advisors. Our experimental design allows us to identify clean causal effects of the advisor's skin color on how subjects value and utilize advice. We find that subjects with conservative political views make less use of advice received from Black rather than white advisors and perform worse on a non-routine task where utilizing advice increases productivity. Conservatives do not foresee the negative performance effects of their own discriminatory behavior and do not prefer white over Black advisors. This suggests that the behavior of conservatives is driven by implicit (unconscious) discrimination. The data also show no discrimination by conservatives under high stakes, suggesting that unconscious discrimination is price-sensitive. Studying subjects with liberal political views, we find no discrimination against Black advisors, or even Black-favoring behaviors.