Hidden Brain - Episode 28: #AirbnbWhileBlack
Episode Date: April 26, 2016The sharing economy is great. It gives us opportunities to connect with strangers... to pool resources... to get a cheap ride, or a weekend away. But this week on Hidden Brain, we'll look at how these... new platforms can amplify some old biases.
Transcript
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This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. I was on Facebook the other day when a friend
request came in. I don't have a great memory for faces and names, so I found myself trying
to figure out if I had met this person somewhere.
But then, at the back of my mind, I remembered a study. It set my friendship choices on Facebook might be shaped by biases outside of my conscious
awareness in my hidden brain.
Michelle Hebel is a psychologist at Rice University who ran the Facebook study.
She designed fictitious profiles for two men and two women.
Both men were named Michael Davis, both women were Jennifer Davis, all the characters were
African-American.
The only real difference between the profiles
were the photos.
One Photoshop version of Michael Davis and Jennifer Davis
had lighter skin.
The other had darker skin.
Mickey Hebel sent out friend requests on Facebook
on behalf of these fictitious characters
to more than 1,000 people in a big American city. Since these were invented characters, most of the requests were declined. But there
was a big disparity in how often whites accepted friend requests from the darker skin,
michaels, and genifers. People were less likely to friend them. They were less likely particularly to friend the dark black males.
If you follow these kinds of experiments, this finding is disappointing but not surprising.
Using similar experimental methods, researchers have found disparities in the way professors
spend time with students, how companies select job applicants for interviews, even how
legislators respond to constituents.
But something new is happening today. The biased decisions we once made in interpersonal
settings are now being made on giant online platforms, where our actions have the potential
to affect many more people. Think about the way you might look for a roommate. Once upon
a time, you may have put up a flyer on a bulletin board and talk to people who responded. Today you might turn to sites such as roommates.com
or Craigslist. Raj Gosha, a sociologist at Gautier College in Baltimore, recently conducted a
roommate study on Craigslist using a technique similar to the one Mickey Hebel used on Facebook.
We definitely found a pattern of preference or bias in favor of white sounding names.
So for every 100 replies that a white sounding name got a Latina name got about 75 and an
African-American name got about 65 or something like that.
That is a huge difference.
It's a pretty big difference, right?
So if you're African-American, you'd have to spend about one and a half times as much
time applying for housing as would somebody with a white name. So if you're African American, you'd have to spend about one and a half times as much time
Applying for housing as would somebody with a white name on today's podcast
We're going to delve into what happens when age-old biases rear their heads in a new and growing part of our lives
What sometimes called the sharing economy?
It's one thing if I want to discriminate about who I'm gonna have over on Friday night
To have for dinner or who I want to have sleep over.
But it's another thing when my private house starts to become my business.
The sharing economy, platforms that allow you to hail a taxi, call a babysitter, find
a room on Airbnb, rely on making what used to be business exchanges into semi-personal transactions. Your
Uber driver sees your name and photograph. You see your driver's name and photo. It's
supposed to increase trust, and there's every reason to think it does. But it also does
something else.
When you give people names, then you give people information about your ethnicity. You
give people information that they can use to look you up and figure out more cute about you.
And that becomes problematic.
Mickey was on a ship when I interviewed her. She's teaching at Semester at C.
During the long voyage, she says, her students tell her about the many online platforms that they are using.
There's a website called care.com. And it's a babysitting website where people advertise themselves as babysitters.
And they have to put a picture of themselves on. So you can think about how, again, maybe
I don't want a babysitter that is of that race. Maybe I don't want a babysitter that is
of that gender. And so you begin to see where this very subtle type of discrimination
can be very systemic. The sharing economy is unleashing new possibilities in our lives.
These platforms allow us to meet more people, visit more places, get more connected.
I'm personally a fan of many apps.
But it also seems clear to me that these platforms provide a mechanism to amplify our collective
bias.
What's especially insidious about the biases on these platforms is that their consequences
are largely hidden.
If your request to be a babysitter gets turned down, you have no way of knowing if this
was driven by racial bias.
So I asked hidden brain producers Maggie Pennman and Max Nestrak to take a few weeks and
try to find people who were personally affected by such biases.
They decided to focus on an important new part of the sharing economy, Airbnb.
Imagine you're going on vacation with some friends. You do a quick search online,
find a few hotels in the city you'd like to stay in. You pick one, ideally with a hot tub,
and enter your credit card information. Great, you think.
I'll set.
But then you get an email.
We're sorry, but the dates you just booked aren't available after all.
They were listed by mistake.
Now, if this happened to you once, you might chalk it up to a weird website glitch.
But if it happened to you over and over, something would start to feel funny.
You might start to feel like it's something about you that's making these hotels suddenly
unavailable.
This is exactly how Christina Crittenden felt when she would try to use Airbnb to book vacations with
her friends. She would find a house that was listed as available, send a booking request,
and I would get declined all the time.
Christina got a bunch of similar responses.
The whole suit always come up with excuses like, oh, someone actually just booked it.
Or oh, some of my regulars are coming in town and they're going to stay there.
I just haven't updated my calendar.
But I got suspicious when I would check back like days later and see that those dates
are still available.
Kertina is black.
And this is relevant because on Airbnb, both hosts and guests have their names and photos
prominently displayed on their profiles.
And this is actually one of the platform's selling points.
It's supposed to make these transactions between strangers feel less anonymous and less scary.
But it also made Gratina start to wonder if these rejections had something to do with
her race.
My name is Gratina.
I have a very black sounding name and I also had my photo so I'm very clearly a black woman.
And when she looked at the reviews that previous guests had left for these hosts?
I never saw anybody who looked like me.
So Kertina did what any good millennial does when they're frustrated.
She took to Twitter.
And I was just venting my frustrations and I just included a lot of screenshots of the messages
that I was getting from people and I put
the hashtag Airbnb While Black.
She started hearing from lots of friends who had similar experiences.
The most common response that I got was, oh yeah, that's why I don't use my photo.
Like duh.
Like I was the late one.
And one friend who hadn't.
One of my friends who was actually black,
he responded to me and said,
well, I've never had an issue.
And then he went back and checked his profile.
And I guess he'd never want to use his photo.
So he realized that the whole time he had been using a photo
of some random white guy from our school.
And so he's like, oh, maybe this is why I've never had an issue.
So, Koutina decided to tweak her profile. I shortened my name to Justina, which is a name that I go by
in work and in other settings. And I changed my photo to a landscape. Ever since I changed my name
and my photo, I've never had any issues on Airbnb. Now, it's impossible to say exactly why
Cartina was rejected by those specific hosts.
But a recent study shows racial discrimination on Airbnb is widespread.
I'm Michael Luka. I'm a faculty member at Harvard Business School.
I'm an assistant professor of business administration.
Michael Luka and his colleagues Benjamin Adelman and Dan Savirsky
sent out fake Airbnb requests to real-life hosts
So we sent out 6400 requests to stay with people and we kept every request the same the only thing that was different about the request
The profiles attached them either had African American sounding names or white sounding names
So like does Brad get the same number of responses on Airbnb as Jamal. And unfortunately, we could see that there was a very different response rate and acceptance
rate for African-American guests relative to white guests.
Having an African-American name leads to roughly a 15% lower chance of being accepted as a
guest on Airbnb relative to having a distinctively white name, holding all else constant.
To put this in perspective, Airbnb isn't some little start-up anymore.
It's one of the largest players in the hotel industry worldwide.
In 2015, more than two million listings were offered on the platform from hosts around
the world.
That's nearly four times as many rooms as the Marriott Hotel chain.
You can even run to Castle.
You can even run to Castle.
And it's not just vacation rentals.
People are finding housing on this platform for months at a time.
So discrimination on Airbnb is discrimination in the housing market.
Michael Luka and his colleagues think people could be discriminating without even knowing it.
Buying a lot of people is something that is accidental.
What Michael Luka is talking about is unconscious bias.
These hidden associations we have that affect our behavior
without us realizing it.
It's unlikely that most hosts are saying to themselves,
I'm going to reject this person
because I don't want to write to a black person.
I mean, maybe some people are intentionally discriminating.
There are probably some people like that,
but Michael Lucas suspects the way Airbnb's platform is designed
is triggering the associations people have of some racial groups.
So because names and photos are the first thing people see, it may also be one of the first
things they consider consciously or unconsciously when choosing a place to stay.
Hiennes-Kali's looked at five major cities in the US, and discrimination was happening across
the board.
We saw that there is discrimination among cheap listings,
expensive listings, in diverse neighborhoods,
in homogenous neighborhoods, among White House,
and among African American hosts.
I actually spoke to Mike Luca last week.
That's David King, the brand new director
of diversity and belonging at Airbnb.
He knows this is a problem, and he wants Airbnb
to be a leader on fixing it.
There is a racial bias in platforms platforms and we are working with Mike Luca and any other
external interested parties and how do we address and fix this problem.
One thing that could fix the problem is just getting rid of names and photos or making
them last prominent.
But Airbnb doesn't think that would improve their platform.
The photos are on the platform for a reason. Number one, it really does help to
aid in the trust between the guests and the host. And secondary to that is
safety. You want to make sure that that guest that shows up your door is the
person that you've been communicating with. But David King also pointed out
there's a lot of opportunity for Airbnb to do good. They're bringing together
people from all different backgrounds who wouldn't normally meet.
We've done some recent reports in Chicago and New York,
pointing out that underserved communities,
especially African-American communities,
have benefited quite a bit from our platform,
usually in neighborhoods where there are few hotels.
One of those neighborhoods with few hotels
is Washington DC's Anacostia.
The neighborhood is on the edge of city limits, on the other side of the Anacostia River The neighborhood is on the edge of city limits
on the other side of the Anacostia River
from the capital on the Washington Monument.
It's a neighborhood with a lot of big box doors
and empty lots, but also row houses
and families that go back generations.
We went there to visit Airbnb host Sinta Keeling.
Hi, how are you?
Sinta owns a three-story townhouse
in a new development.
She rents out two rooms on Airbnb.
There's a fitness room, cable and high-speed internet, solar panels, and slippers for all of her guests.
I love the slippers, first of all.
So, I do know.
Sinta is a super host, and we're not just saying that because of the slippers.
It's an official designation she's earned from Airbnb.
Based on positive reviews from her guests, her responsiveness to booking requests, and the fact that she's never canceled a
booking. It shows Airbnb travelers she's been verified as a good person to stay
with. Sintis says as a black host in a black neighborhood that's important.
She feels like she gets held to a higher standard than other hosts.
This neighborhood is called Capitol View and it's 98% African-American double
digit unemployment.
We asked him to weather her race and the racial composition of her neighborhood made it harder
to get gas and she said.
Absolutely.
Yeah, no, I had one.
I've had some instances where people will ask me all these questions about unsafe and
I'll say, you know, I'm a black Filipino woman.
I take, we take great pride in our community.
This is absolutely a good place for you to stay
and I'll say those things and then they'll be crickets.
They'll just not book.
But Sinta also said there were great things about Airbnb.
For one thing, it brings her a steady second income.
Airbnb brings business to the stores and restaurants
that don't typically benefit from the tourism industry.
It might even help change people's perceptions
of anacostia. Airbnb's slogan is,
Belong Anywhere. And there's some truth to it.
Sinti Keeling told us a story about one of her guests that drove this message home.
He came back from being out for the day and told her,
I took the bus back and I was the only white person on the bus. And it was all these black people.
I was the only white person on the bus. And it was all these black people.
And I asked myself, were they going to hurt me?
Am I unsafe?
And then I realized they weren't hurting me.
And nothing was going to happen to me.
Like they were just sitting there normal.
And he was saying this in a way that he was like he mentally realized the
horiteness of that he was saying with the same time he was just being honest
about what he was thinking and that he arrived to the stop and just said come
off and like nothing had happened to him and it was just this shock.
Sentence says she knows that some people won't run from her because she's a
black host in a predominantly black neighborhood. But here's the thing she's glad those people don't run from her because she's a black host in a predominantly black neighborhood.
But here's the thing, she's glad those people don't book with her.
The strange thing about Airbnb makes it tough is I really don't want a racist guest in
my house because I live here in the space so I don't need to feel uncomfortable, you know,
the other way.
But if you just feel like, well, you know, maybe
I'll give this a shot that I'm willing to be open-minded.
The fact is Airbnb is not the same thing as a major hotel chain. Hosts have discretion
on the platform, but guests don't have the same legal recourse as hotel customers if
they feel they've been discriminated against.
We spoke to a couple lawyers for this story, and the legal picture is a little murky here.
It isn't clear who, if anyone, is liable for discrimination on a web-based platform.
So Airbnb does offer this opportunity to experience different cultures, to meet people
you wouldn't normally meet.
But sometimes, hidden bias is getting in the way.
And people like Kratina and Sinta are paying the price.
That's Maggie Pennman and Max Nestrak reporting on people who feel they have
personally experienced bias in the sharing economy.
When we come back, Maggie Max and I will discuss potential solutions to the problem.
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This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
We're exploring the many ways in which the sharing economy
might allow hidden biases to flourish.
As apps in the sharing economy become an increasingly large part of our lives,
they have the potential to create great disparities.
Producers Maggie Pennman and Max Nestrac are in the studio with me now
to talk about potential solutions.
Hi Max.
Hi Shankar.
Hey Maggie.
Hey Shankar.
Maggie, if I understand correctly,
Airbnb actually gives hosts a mechanism to avoid this problem. It's true. There's this feature
called Instant Book, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Basically, as a guest, you can book a room
just like you would a hotel without waiting to be accepted by the host. Why would hosts want to
offer this option? Well, it's much more convenient for guests, so I think you're more likely to get bookings if you offer instant book. And then
it's also easy for hosts because if you're renting out your whole house and you don't
really care who stays there, you can just offer this option and not deal with it. And
is there any evidence that this feature is actually being used to avoid discrimination
on Airbnb? Yeah, Max and I actually talked to the sky, Reed Kennedy, he's African-American,
and his experience with Airbnb
was very similar to Curtinas.
And so after being rejected,
I think in that case, four times within the same day,
four reasons again that weren't specified,
I started to see a pattern.
So Reed complained to Airbnb,
and Airbnb gave him a credit,
but he was struggling to use this credit
because he was still having trouble booking a place.
So he used Insta book.
And ironically, the host was a black man who may have been using the Insta book feature
for the same reason I was.
So Max, what I'm hearing Maggie say is that they might be a design solution for the psychological
problem of bias.
Yeah, and this is similar to a solution that Michael Luca came up with.
He worked with a computer scientist
and they developed this Google Chrome app
called Debiased Yourself.
It removes photos and names from people's profiles,
so you can't discriminate even by accident.
And didn't Michael Luca say he actually got this idea
from Orkestress?
He did.
So it used to be that back in the day,
Orkestress were overwhelmingly male.
And people may have thought,
oh, there's just more male musicians, or maybe they're just better, but then there started to be a shift
in orchestras, where there were more women, and researchers went back and looked at this, and they
found that there had been a change to the audition process, where there was now a screen in between
the judges and the person auditioning. And Mike Lucas says, this is something
that Airbnb should be doing only on a larger scale.
One of the things that I love about the digital world
is that it gives us the opportunity to choose
exactly where to put screens and where not to put screens.
So I think we have a host of new decisions
that we can make as market designers
that will decide how inclusive a society we have or how much discrimination we want to encourage or allow.
I have to say it might not all be about the information that you're hiding.
It could also be about the information that you're emphasizing.
Raj Gosal, this is a sociologist at Gauter College who did the study on Craigslist,
suggested that we might want to be playing up certain kinds of information.
Perhaps colleges and universities can play a role in this
and perhaps websites like Craigslist or roommates.com
could do more to actually like front load information
about people's living habits or cultural identities.
What time people get up and go to bed,
what level of messy they are, that sort of thing. Rather than immediately hitting people over the head with somebody's name, just
because all the evidence we have, evidence from other studies just suggests that race
in names is such a powerful signal to people that we probably don't actually want it to
be the first thing or the immediate thing that people see in our deciding by.
Yeah, that's a really interesting idea.
Another option would be to offer trainings
about unconscious bias to hosts.
So Airbnb has actually already taken the step
of training their employees and some hosts
in recognizing and combating unconscious bias.
And maybe if they make that information available
on a larger scale, hosts will start to check their own biases.
Another idea that we've heard is to provide feedback to hosts.
So Airbnb could send hosts and emails saying,
here are the requests you received and here are the guests you accepted.
Now, if someone doesn't want to host people from certain racial groups,
this feedback wouldn't do much.
But for those who might not mean to discriminate,
it could be enough to nudge them in the right direction.
Well, that's interesting stuff.
Thanks so much, Max.
Thank you.
Thanks, Maggie.
Thanks, much Max. Thank you. Thanks Maggie. Thanks Shunker. The Hidden Brain Podcast is produced by Karam Agar Kalasen, Maggie Pennman, and Max Nesterak.
If you like this episode, consider giving us a review on iTunes. It will have other people find the podcast.
We're going to be talking about this episode on social media, using the hashtag Airbnb
Wild Black.
Do join the conversation.
I'm Shankar Vedantantham, and this is NPR.
If you're looking for something else to listen to this week, check out the Ted Radio Hour.
This week the show touches every third rail, race, abortion, even the Israel-Palestine
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On this episode, Ted speakers offer ideas on how we might do more than just tolerate the
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but rather learn from them. Listen to the Ted Radio R podcast at npr.org slash podcast and on the NPR1 app.