Objective Measures and Implicit Bias in Evaluating Public Officials

对男女法官进行差别评价的机制尚未具体说明。本项目假设内隐偏见可以影响法官在司法绩效评估中的评价。隐性偏见调动了人们对谁应该担任一个职位的印象，允许对处于某个职位的非规范性人进行更严厉的评估，因为他们不符合刻板印象。人们可能会在不知不觉中惩罚不符合法官规范形象的法官。例如，他们可能会基于刻板印象来框定他们对某些特征的评价，比如礼貌、知识和效率。无意识的偏见会导致女性和少数族裔法官在司法业绩评估中得分较低，无论其评估者的种族和性别如何。以前的研究没有评估控制工作绩效的客观衡量标准的绩效评估分数的差异。该项目汇集了10个州的司法绩效评估数据。它将女性和少数民族法官的分数与白人男性法官的分数进行了比较。它还考察了分数上的性别/种族差距与评估法官的性别和种族之间的关系。这一结果将有助于理解隐性偏见是否可能成为评估公职人员的一个因素。该项目将有助于改进法官的业绩衡量标准，这对追究公职人员的问责制很重要。调查员将向法官、政策制定者、研究人员和州司法业绩委员会提供司法业绩评价的结果数据库。调查员还将在一个互动网站上向公众展示这些信息。调查员还将与政策制定者分享业绩评价最佳做法摘要，使他们能够根据经验数据修订业绩评价。

The mechanism for differential evaluation of men and women judges has not been specified. This project hypotheses that implicit bias could shape the evaluation of judges in judicial performance evaluations. Implicit bias mobilizes people's images of who should be holding a position, allowing non-normative people in a position to be evaluated more harshly because they do not fit a stereotype. People may unconsciously penalize judges who do not fit the normative image of a judge. They may frame their evaluations of certain characteristics like courteousness, knowledge, and efficiency based on stereotypes, for example. Unconscious bias would result in lower scores for women and minority judges in judicial performance evaluations, regardless the race and gender of their evaluators. Previous research has not evaluated discrepancies in performance evaluation scores controlling for objective measures of job performance. This project assembles data from judicial performance evaluations across 10 states. It compares the scores of female and minority judges with those of their white male counterparts. It also looks at the relationship between the gender/race gap in scores and the gender and race of those who are evaluating the judges. The results will contribute to understanding whether implicit bias could be a factor in assessing public officials. This project will contribute to improving measures of performance of judges, important in the accountability of public officials. The investigator will make the resulting data base on judicial performance evaluations available to judges, policy makers, researchers and state judicial performance commissions. The investigator will also present the information to the public in an interactive website. The investigator will also share a summary of best practices for performance evaluations with policymakers, allowing them to revise performance evaluations based in empirical data.