> Maybe all the lawyers and jurors should be literally blindfolded, like Lady Justice.
This should be doable by requiring the entire process be done remotely. Seems like a perfect time to try it out too! Even regional accent bias[1] can be removed by requiring unformatted text responses.
25 years of online communities provides a great testbed for this hypothesis.
Language becomes the new class marker. Even in strictly text-based media, people make snap judgments about who is worth listening to. It's based on spelling, complete sentences, punctuation, 1337speak or other dialects, even things as subtle as paragraph structure and who (and how) you cite. Back before Tinder became a thing, I knew several women (my now-wife among them) who would instantly ignore a man if he had spelling errors or improper grammar in his online dating profile.
Daniel Kahneman wrote once that if you really want an unbiased decision, you need to have a computer make it, because all humans are biased. Even then, the software ends up biased in the same way as its creators.
> Even regional accent bias[1] can be removed by requiring unformatted text responses.
I'm not sure replacing accent bias with spelling and grammar and familiarity-with-IM-tools bias is an improvement. And we might overestimate our ability to spot lying in person, but it's a damn sight better than our ability to gauge it based on speed and coherence in typing responses...
This should be doable by requiring the entire process be done remotely. Seems like a perfect time to try it out too! Even regional accent bias[1] can be removed by requiring unformatted text responses.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_perception