What’s In A Name? It Could Matter If You’re Writing To Your Lawmaker

*More and more studies and surveys are confirming what we knew all along. There are attitudes and prejudices in government, business and education that see Latinos as “other.” And those attitudes have direct, negative consequences. VL

By Shankar Vedantam, NPR Morning Edition

In recent years, social scientists have tried to find out whether important decisions are shaped by subtle biases. They’ve studied recruiters as they decide whom to hire. They’ve studied teachers, deciding which students to help at school. And they’ve studied doctors, figuring out what treatments to give patients. Now, researchers have trained their attention on a new group of influential people — state legislators.

Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, and graduate student Matthew Mendez wanted to see if state legislators were equally responsive to their constituents. For part of their experiment, the researchers sent emails to 1,871 legislators in 14 states with large Latino populations, asking the politicians what kind of documentation they needed to vote. They randomly assigned legislators to get the emails, but some emails came from a man named Jacob Smith, and others came from a man named Santiago Rodriguez.

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[Photo by Benevolent Media/Flickr]

 

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