9 The Studies and Experiments
Discrimination in the Weakest Link Game Show
We begin with a study of potential discrimination exhibited by contestants in a popular British game show called the Weakest Link. This is not a show where contestants play the Weakest Link Game described in Chapter 8. Rather, the goal of the game is for a group of contestants to vote individuals off the show one-by-one in successive rounds until only two contestants remain to compete for a grand prize. The contestants who are voted off are considered “weak links” as a consequence of strategic play by the individual members of the group. Weak links are considered liabilities to the remaining group members in terms of building up the jackpot and, potentially, being one of the two remaining contestants to play for it. If you have the time and are interested in watching the show, check out this Youtube video (and hold onto your Bowler hat. It’s a lively, fast-paced contest).
Levitt (2004) observed that contestant voting behavior on the show provides an opportunity to distinguish between what he calls taste-based (bad!) and information-based (not as bad!) theories of discrimination. Taste-based discrimination occurs when an individual prefers not to interact with a particular class of people, and he is willing to pay a financial price to avoid such interactions. In contrast, an individual practicing information-based discrimination has no animus against a particular class of people but discriminates nonetheless because she has less reliable (i.e., noisy) information about them.
Contestants answer trivia questions over a series of rounds, and one contestant is eliminated each round based upon the votes of the other contestants until only two contestants remain. The last two contestants compete head-to-head for the winner-take-all prize. Because the prize money at stake is potentially large (the money is an increasing function of the number of questions answered correctly by the group over the course of the game’s rounds), contestants have powerful incentives to vote in a manner that maximizes their individual chance of being one of two remaining contestants to compete for the jackpot.
In the early rounds of the contest, strategic incentives encourage voting for the weakest competitors. However, in later rounds, the incentives reverse, and the strongest competitors become the logical target of eviction. Both theories of discrimination suggest that, in early rounds, excess votes will be cast against people targeted for discrimination. If group members practice taste-based discrimination, then in later rounds, these excess votes would persist, whereas if information-based discrimination is practiced, then votes against the targeted people would diminish.
Levitt (2004) found that contestants voted strategically in early rounds of the game but not in later rounds. Specifically, voting strategically means both voting off players who, in the game’s early rounds, more frequently answer