In the experimental study of discrimination, researchers often manipulate cues of social identity to isolate their discriminatory effects, holding all else constant. But a large literature raises both theoretical and methodological concerns about such research designs. Bridging this theoretical and empirical work, we find strong evidence that researchers face a double-bind: experimentally manipulating one identity leads survey respondents to infer information about correlated social identities (violating the information equivalence assumption), but constraining the experimental profiles to satisfy information equivalence produces rare and ungeneralizeable treatments. This methodological flaw carries important substantive implications: violations of information equivalence lead to biased estimates of race-based discrimination in ways that impact policy prescriptions. Through novel survey experiments we comprehensively examine this information equivalence violation and propose design-based solutions to this double bind. We then replicate six published audit experiments manipulating race, and show how manipulating class identity as well substantially changes estimates of racial discrimination in predictable ways, both related to theories of taste-based versus statistical discrimination and bearing important implications for anti-discrimination regulations.
This registration applies to the "novel survey experiments" portion of the project
