Do I Look Like a Criminal? Examining how Race Presentation Impacts Human Judgement of Recidivism

Understanding how racial information impacts human decision making in online systems is critical in today's world. Prior work revealed that race information of criminal defendants, when presented as a text field, had no significant impact on users' judgements of recidivism. We replicated and extended this work to explore how and when race information influences users' judgements, with respect to the saliency of presentation. Our results showed that adding photos to the race labels had a significant impact on recidivism predictions for users who identified as female, but not for those who identified as male. The race of the defendant also impacted these results, with black defendants being less likely to be predicted to recidivate compared to white defendants. These results have strong implications for how system-designers choose to display race information, and cautions researchers to be aware of gender and race effects when using Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.