Racist on Tuesdays: The Relationship between High-Salience Events and Variation in Discrimination

One of the persistent questions in the social sciences is why economic discrimination continues despite legal and social pressures. Multiple studies have considered how large organizations may reduce inequality through organizational or regulatory change. However, it is less obvious how to reduce the interpersonal biases in the one-on-one interactions that dominate market interactions. In particular, taste-based biases are assumed to be constant: people who dislike the members of a particular group do not solicit new information or update their behavior. We propose that taste- based bias varies as the salience of the governing category fluctuates. We consider how an event that increases the salience of racial divisions might affect the unrelated economic activity of minorities–crowdfunding project success. Our preliminary findings indicate that African- American founders experience negative effects, in particular for projects with a creative orientation, which may reflect the fact that these projects are ...