Great Performance !

Think about how you describe yourself during a job interview versus how you might describe yourself on a first date. (For even more fun, compare that first-date conversation to a conversation with the same person during your tenth year of marriage.) Or think about how you might present yourself if you were going on national television for the first time. What sort of image would you want to project? Perhaps you want to seem clever or kind or good-looking; presumably you don’t want to come off as cruel or bigoted. During the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, its members took pride in publicly disparaging anybody who wasn’t a conservative white Christian. But public bigotry has since been vastly curtailed. (Stetson Kennedy, now eighty-eight years old, attributes this evolution in some part to his long-ago “Frown Power” campaign.) Even subtle displays of bigotry, if they be come public, are now costly. Trent Lott, the majority leader of the
U.S. Senate, learned this in 2002 after making a toast at a one hundredth birthday party for Strom Thurmond, his fellow senator and fellow southerner. Lott made a reference in his toast to Thurmond’s 1948 campaign for president, which was built on a platform of segregation; Mississippi—Lott’s home state—was one of just four states that Thurmond carried. “We’re proud of it,” Lott told the partygoers. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.” The implication that Lott was a fan of segregation raised enough of a fury that he was forced to quit his Senate leadership post.

Even if you are a private citizen, you surely wouldn’t want to seem bigoted while appearing in public. Might there be a way to test for discrimination in a public setting?

Unlikely as it may seem, the television game show The Weakest Link provides a unique laboratory to study discrimination. An import from the United Kingdom, The Weakest Link for a short time became wildly popular in the United States. The game includes eight contestants (or, in a later daytime version, six) who each answer trivia questions and compete for a single cash jackpot. But the player who answers the most questions correctly isn’t necessarily the player who advances. After each round, every contestant votes to eliminate one other contestant. A player’s trivia-answering ability is presumably the only worthwhile factor to consider; race, gender, and age wouldn’t seem to matter. But do they? By measuring a contestant’s actual votes against the votes that would truly best serve his self-interest, it’s possible to tell if discrimination is at play.

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything