A stranger emails you a simple question. Whether you write back, it turns out, depends on the name in the “from” line — and on the race it signals.
Measuring everyday discrimination is hard, because people rarely admit to it. So the study sent near-identical, innocuous emails to 250,000 citizens drawn at random from public voter-registration lists. The messages were the same; only the sender's name varied — chosen to signal that the writer was Black or white. Then the researchers simply waited to see who got a reply.
Emails signed with a Black-sounding name were answered less often than identical ones with a white-sounding name. To gauge how serious that everyday “paper cut” discrimination is, the authors benchmark it against discrimination measured in other settings — and it lands squarely in the middle.
The gap wasn't confined to one region or one group of senders. The discrimination against Black correspondents showed up among every racial and ethnic group of responders (except among Black responders themselves) and across every area of the country.
Most research on discrimination looks at high-stakes gatekeeping — hiring, housing, lending. This study shows that bias also operates in the mundane, peer-to-peer exchanges that make up most of social life. A reply that never comes is small. Millions of them, distributed by race, are not.
Block, Ray, Charles Crabtree, John B. Holbein, and J. Quin Monson. “Are Americans Less Likely to Reply to Emails from Black People Relative to White People?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(52): e2110347118, 2021.
read the paper →a nationally representative correspondence (audit) study of the u.s. public · the benchmark ladder in scene 02 reflects the paper's own comparison (more than elected officials, higher education, and the medical sector; less than housing and employment) — exact reply-rate estimates and confidence intervals are reported in the paper