Penn/Cornell NBA study: Blacks called for more fouls

Story in The New York Times May 2 says white referees call fouls on black NBA players more frequently, up to 2.5% to 4.5% more than expected. There's a slightly lesser instance when a black officiating crew calls fouls on whites in the NBA. It's by a Penn professor, Justin Wolfers, and Joseph Price, a Cornell economics grad student. The story says Wolfers/Price sought to weed out factors like home and away games, player rookie vs veteran status, position (centers are whiter than other positions, but don't tell that to Shaq), intentional fouls (guys put in late in the game to hack away), player assertiveness (measured by steals and assists), head coach assertiveness, and then compared for the number of whites and blacks in the three-person officiating crews.

In statistical terms, black players receive 0.12 to 0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played with an all-white officiating crew vs. an all-black crew. In practical terms, for each additional black player you have on court relative to other team, your odds of winning fall from 50% to 49%, 48%, etcetera.

Blacks played 83% of the minutes in the NBA during the 10-year period studied. Whites were 68% of the refs. The three-person crews were all white 30% of the time an two-thirds white another 47%. The NBA says the study is wrong but (what a surprise) won't make accessible its even-more thorough database. The NY Times showed the study to third-party experts who said the research paper's conclusion made more sense than the NBA's.

If the link above doesn't work (may be subscribers only), here's an open link to the entire paper: [graphics.nytimes.com]. If you want to know about Price, here's his Cornell page (which the NYT cited, too, so I'm not like invading his privacy): www.people.cornell.edu/pages/jpp34

The list cited by the Times seemed pretty comprehensive, but I didn't see anything sociological, for instance, that if NBA-bound blacks grow up poorer or in more violent communities than NBA-bound whites, maybe they're more prone to fouling. But that's a reach, and if that were the case, then refs of all colors would see it.

billhoward
Story in The New York Times May 2 says white referees call fouls on black NBA players more frequently...

NYT article
Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban said, “No comment.”

He then excused himself to try and get Steve Nash back.

Bill, your subject line is misleading. The study concludes that there is a positive bias toward players when the referee is the same race and a negative bias when they are of different races. They try to demonstrate that there is racial bias both ways.

Now it's true that there are more white refs than black in the league and more black players. So strictly speaking your subject line may be true. But it distorts the conclusion here making it sound like "white refs are racists" rather than everyone has subconcious racial biases.

As always with a study of this kind I'm a little skeptical (not having read the whole paper). There are just too many things to control for and many of them are subjective ("head coach assertiveness"?) But it's not a shocking or even particularly troubling result.

Of course, this also points to one of the reasons I've never liked basketball much. Way too many foul calls that seem to be very subjective.

KeithK
Of course, this also points to one of the reasons I've never liked basketball much. Way too many foul calls that seem to be very subjective.

Many penalties in hockey are just as subjective.

Which isn't to say that you should start liking basketball, of course.

It cuts both ways but with most of the refs white and the players black, the majority of the subconsciously racially biased calls would be on black players. That was also the context of the lead paragraphs of the article. Or, as Wolfers said, "It suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you'd win a few more games." He didn't say that if you painted the refs black, you'd lose fewer games.

I thought about the subject line as I wrote it and opted to cram in as much as possible: Penn ... Cornell (even though the Cornell angle is secondary) ... NBA, plus something to make you want to read more.

I thought about something neutral and wimpy such as "Academic study discusses offiating trends in professional sports." Like that'd have people clicking the Read button.

Speaking of racial bias and pre-formed opinions: Fun to see how well a middle-age white guy like David Stern can dance the next couple days. The material attributed to him such as that the NBA's greater reserch data "at the end of the day ... is personnel data" sounds a bit defensive.

It's going to be an easy week for the Letterman and Leno monologue writers.

KeithK
But it's not a shocking or even particularly troubling result.

How about not shocking, but still troubling? Or at least unfortunate.

This has gotten some pretty significant run already, at least on NY talk radio (1050 ESPN). Listening to Stephen A. Smith and his sidekick Mike something discount the study off-hand, without reading it, and saying (Mike said this) something to the effect of, "Those academics should stay in their Ivy League think-tanks and leave the sports to people who have any credibility," made me want to jump through my radio. Luckily, I just turned it off. However, ignorance like this, in which analysts refuse to even read what they are commenting on, much less, understand that a couple percentage points above chance might be statistically significant drives me moderately insane. I guess I need to pick my spots better with which shows I listen to.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to working, being depressed about Phil Hughes, and preparing to forget this garbage and enjoy Slope Day this weekend. Oh, and LGR(angers)!

On WEEI here in Boston Dale and Holley were joking around with the report too, but they didn't tell the Ivy League to keep to themselves. Granted I may have missed some dialogue, but they basically passed it off as nothing to really worry about. I definitely missed their original introduction of the study, so by the time I tuned in it was more their running joke to pick on Holley (who is African-American).

Your ears will perk up when you are tuning in for Red Sox talk and here discussion of a Cornell grad student though.

billhoward
I thought about something neutral and wimpy such as "Academic study discusses offiating trends in professional sports." Like that'd have people clicking the Read button.

Yeah, right. It's the offseason. I'd click on a thread titled "Click here to watch paint dry."

Robb

billhoward
I thought about something neutral and wimpy such as "Academic study discusses offiating trends in professional sports." Like that'd have people clicking the Read button.

Yeah, right. It's the offseason. I'd click on a thread titled "Click here to watch paint dry".

FYP

BCrespi
This has gotten some pretty significant run already, at least on NY talk radio (1050 ESPN). Listening to Stephen A. Smith and his sidekick Mike something discount the study off-hand, without reading it, and saying (Mike said this) something to the effect of, "Those academics should stay in their Ivy League think-tanks and leave the sports to people who have any credibility," made me want to jump through my radio. Luckily, I just turned it off. However, ignorance like this, in which analysts refuse to even read what they are commenting on, much less, understand that a couple percentage points above chance might be statistically significant drives me moderately insane.

You must really enjoy Joe Morgan, then.

[www.sfweekly.com]

All-in-all, it's along the same lines as the Cornell research from the late '80s about how sports teams wearing black tend to be more aggressive than those wearing other colors.

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

I think this current paper will get more play in the media because it's more culturally relevant and touches on the not-at-all incendiary topic of racism.

Robb

billhoward
I thought about something neutral and wimpy such as "Academic study discusses offiating trends in professional sports." Like that'd have people clicking the Read button.

Yeah, right. It's the offseason. I'd click on a thread titled "Click here to watch paint dry."

At least we're not into the Trebuchet discussion portion of the offseason yet.

[elf.elynah.com]
[elf.elynah.com]

DeltaOne81

KeithK
But it's not a shocking or even particularly troubling result.

How about not shocking, but still troubling? Or at least unfortunate.

Oh, it's certainly unfortunate that people have ingrained biases towards people that are like them (racial, ethnic, religious, whatever). I say it's not particularly troubling because the effect, if real, appears to be small if still measureable. There's no allegation here that the league or white refs are trying to screw black players. That would be very troubling.

I would've chosen something closer to "Penn/Cornell NBA study: Race influences foul calls". That's closer to accurate and still has the catchy "race" word.

I want mor trebuchets!

Rita

Robb

billhoward
I thought about something neutral and wimpy such as "Academic study discusses offiating trends in professional sports." Like that'd have people clicking the Read button.

Yeah, right. It's the offseason. I'd click on a thread titled "Click here to watch cheese age".

FYP

FYP.

BCrespi
However, ignorance like this, in which analysts refuse to even read what they are commenting on, much less, understand that a couple percentage points above chance might be statistically significant drives me moderately insane. I guess I need to pick my spots better with which shows I listen to.

Why worry about these guys? Our president seems to get along quite well doing the same thing.

P. 29: "Table 3 is instructive, showing that the rate at which fouls are earned by black players is largely invariant to the racial composition of the refereeing crew."

P. 4: "Moreover,in light of the mismatch between the composition of the players (around four-fifths of whom are black) and their evaluators (around two-thirds of referees are white in our sample), an own-race preference may drive an aggregate bias against blacks (or for
whites)."

In plainer words:

> The data revealed no difference in the rate of fouls called on black players between an all black crew or all white crew or any combination in between.

> The only difference was found in rate of fouls called on white players, black crews called at higher rate than white crews

> Point above is the only evidence authors have for their hypothesis of racial disparities in foul calling. They generalize the white player discrimination data to broadly assert race makes a difference on part of all refs against all players (despite their own data that shows it makes no difference in the case of black players).

> Since they have now shown a race bias to exist, and since over 80% of NBA players are black, it is therefore shown that blacks are disproportionately discriminated against in the NBA.

Can you imagine these ideologues teaching your children? Happens every day in PC academe. Shame on Cornell for employing this guy. We can only hope tax dollars didn't pay for this screed.

Danny Ainge was being interviewed on WEEI in Boston now and just said the study isn't false and it holds some weight. This coming from the Celtics front office statistics he said.

He added that the only 100% sure statement he could make was that Bird and Jordan got all the calls.

Ken70
P. 29: "Table 3 is instructive, showing that the rate at which fouls are earned by black players is largely invariant to the racial composition of the refereeing crew."

P. 4: "Moreover,in light of the mismatch between the composition of the players (around four-fifths of whom are black) and their evaluators (around two-thirds of referees are white in our sample), an own-race preference may drive an aggregate bias against blacks (or for
whites)."

I should point out several things:

1) Table 3 does not include controls, and as such it is nearly meaningless, since after including controls there does appear to be a statistically significant relationship between racial composition of officiating crews and fouls called against black players. There certainly appears to be a relationship between race of referee and fouls called against black players, and it's clearly illustrated in Figure 2 (includes controls, methodology may be questionable but there are proper ways to do what they claim they did so I'll assume they did things right).

2) By the same logic, I'm not sure how they can make any claims about whether black officials call disproportionately more fouls on white players, since from what I can see this is not checked as a dependent variable in the multivariate regression analyses. Figure 1 appears to be their big hit there, but it's not clear if they included controls in the stats used to generate those charts, and I don't see the regression tables which show a full-scale analysis of ratio of white referees in the officiating crew as an independent variable *except* where it's interacting with the race of the players. Maybe I missed it, or maybe it was buried in the full-scale table of coefficients, which if you ask me is a hideous way of presenting your results, or maybe they coded their interaction to somehow show the relationship for both whites and blacks, although that's not really standard practice, at least not in my field.

3) My gut response is that I don't like their approach, although I'd have to do way more thinking about it to really tell you why I don't like their methodology or how I would do things differently. It may be perfectly fine, in which case I simply dislike the way they presented the data (unless I'm missing something, which is also entirely possible). At this point I'm not sure I trust their main results, and based on their regression results and other output figures, whether or not this paper will be accepted for publication is largely a toss-up in my mind. Assuming a more rigorous look shows that their methods and results are sound, I'm sure they'll get a revise and resubmit and they'll be told to do a better job of clearly illustrating their results with the appropriate tables and figures. Note I didn't check their theoretical framework, which might be enough all on its own to get accepted/rejected at some journals (I am not an economist, so your mileage may vary).

Can you imagine these ideologues teaching your children? Happens every day in PC academe. Shame on Cornell for employing this guy. We can only hope tax dollars didn't pay for this screed.

Holy leaping logic, Batman! One academic submits something for publication that *may* be a bad piece of research which apparently does not match your own personal world view, and he's an ideologue who's fully representative of everyone in academia. And this in the same post where you complain about them mis-representing statistical results. . . wow.

Note two things:

1) This article has not yet been published, so it might not pass the peer review for the journal, and even if it does it may be a publication mill anyway, in which case nobody in the field will pay much attention to it. Furthermore, the paper may be perfectly sound - I took a much better look at their results than you did, apparently, although it was admittedly a quick glance at the tables and figures, and I still can't say whether or not their findings are any good.

2) According to the NYT article, the Cornell researcher is actually a graduate student, and as such was not exactly "hired" by Cornell (edit - grad students are occasionally considered employees of the university, but it's not like we're really employed here). The only professor involved is at Wharton.

Tom Lento
(edit - grad students are occasionally considered employees of the university, but it's not like we're really employed here)

How to determine if grad students are employees of a university depends on whether they are trying to unionize or attempting to get around worker's compensation laws.

I want to know how never calling fouls on Shaq impacted these studies.