Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, 15260, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 22;13(1):4664. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-31799-y.
Implicit biases occur automatically and unintentionally and are particularly present when we have to make split second decisions. One such situations appears in refereeing, where referees have to make an instantaneous decision on a potential violation. In this work I revisit and extend some of the existing work on implicit biases in refereeing. In particular, I focus on refereeing in the NBA and examine three different types of implicit bias; (i) home-vs-away bias, (ii) bias towards individual players or teams, and, (iii) racial bias. For this study, I use play-by-play data and data from the Last 2 min reports the league office releases for games that were within 5 points in the last 2 min since the 2015 season. The results indicate that the there is a bias towards the home team-particularly pronounced during the playoffs-but it has been reduced since the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, there is robust statistical evidence that specific players benefit from referee decisions more than expected from pure chance. However, I find no evidence of negative bias towards individual players, or towards specific teams. Finally, my analysis on racial bias indicates the absence of any bias.
内隐偏见是自动且无意识产生的，尤其在我们需要做出瞬间决策时更为明显。在裁判工作中就存在这样一种情况，裁判必须对潜在的违规行为做出即时的决定。在这项工作中，我重新审视和扩展了一些关于裁判中的内隐偏见的现有研究。具体来说，我专注于 NBA 的裁判工作，并研究了三种不同类型的内隐偏见：（i）主场-客场偏见，（ii）对个别球员或球队的偏见，以及（iii）种族偏见。对于这项研究，我使用了逐场比赛数据和联盟办公室发布的最后两分钟报告数据，这些数据是针对自 2015 赛季以来最后两分钟比分差距在 5 分以内的比赛。结果表明，主场球队存在偏见——尤其是在季后赛中——但自 COVID-19 大流行以来，这种偏见已经有所减少。此外，有强有力的统计证据表明，特定球员从裁判决策中获益的程度超出了纯粹的机会因素。然而，我没有发现针对个别球员或特定球队的负面偏见的证据。最后，我对内隐种族偏见的分析表明不存在任何偏见。
