IT SOUNDS like an easy question for any half-competent scientist to answer. Do dark-skinned footballers get given red cards more often than light-skinned ones? But, as Raphael Silberzahn of IESE, a Spanish business school, and Eric Uhlmann of INSEAD, an international one (he works in the branch in Singapore), illustrate in this week’s Nature, it is not. The answer depends on whom you ask, and the methods they use.
Dr Silberzahn and Dr Uhlmann sought their answers from 29 research teams. They gave their volunteers the same wodge of data (covering 2,000 male footballers for a single season in the top divisions of the leagues of England, France, Germany and Spain) and waited to see what would come back.
The consensus was that dark-skinned players were about 1.3 times more likely to be sent off than were their light-skinned confrères. But there was a lot of variation. Nine of the research teams found no significant relationship between a player’s skin colour and the likelihood of his receiving a red card. Of the 20 that did find a difference, two groups reported that dark-skinned players were less, rather than more, likely to receive red cards than their paler counterparts (only 89% as likely, to be precise). At the other extreme, another group claimed that dark-skinned players were nearly three times as likely to be sent...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1LBp9LS
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