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Daniel Villiger
Title
Dr. Dr.
Last Name
Villiger
First name
Daniel
Email
daniel.villiger@unisg.ch
Phone
+41 71 224 2987
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PublicationDissecting Discrimination - Identifying Its Various Faces and Their Sources(Universität St. Gallen, )Discrimination is omnipresent, whether it is people who discriminate against other people or, more recently, also machines that discriminate against people. This dissertation explores the phenomenon of discrimination through a descriptive approach, which means that it does not consider whether an act of discrimination is illegitimate or not. The first part of the analysis employs decision theory on discrimination. This leads to two different kinds of social discrimination, namely taste-based and statistical discrimination. While taste-based discrimination can occur in all decision situations, statistical discrimination is only possible in case of decision-making under uncertainty. The second part of the analysis investigates taste-based discrimination. Taste-based discriminators have a taste for certain people and these certain people usually are part of one's ingroup. Ingroup favouritism is mainly the product of ingroup love, yet, to some degree also generated by outgroup derogation and ingroup favouring beliefs. The evolution of such preferences can be explained via parochial altruism, cultural group selection, and gene-culture coevolution. The third part of the analysis surveys the way subjective and objective Bayesians get their beliefs and how humans differ from that due to the biases they have. It reveals that people seem to have inherent prior beliefs and do not exclusively update their beliefs according to Bayes' law. Moreover, the learning environment is of utmost importance for the beliefs someone learns and given this environment is co-shaped by taste-based discriminators, this will be reflected in the learner's beliefs. The last part of the analysis reassembles the previously dissected aspects of discrimination. It presents a new descriptive model of discrimination that is oriented along the dimensions "type of preferences" and "formation of beliefs". Finally, five implications for a normative theory of discrimination are derived. From these it can be inferred that decision theory itself seems to be insufficient so as to define legitimate and illegitimate discrimination.Type: doctoral thesis