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By Root 639 0

and loafers. All were given the same cover story. They were instructed to go to a total of 242 car dealerships in the Chicago area and present themselves as college-educated young professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank) living in the tony Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. Their instructions for what to do were even more specific. They should walk in. They should wait to be approached by a salesperson. “I’m interested in buying this car,” they were supposed to say, pointing to the lowest-priced car in the showroom. Then, after they heard the salesman’s initial offer, they were instructed to bargain back and forth until the salesman either accepted an offer or refused to bargain any further — a process that in almost all cases took about forty minutes. What Ayres was trying to do was zero in on a very specific question: All other things being absolutely equal, how does skin color or gender affect the price that a salesman in a car dealership offers?

The results were stunning. The white men received initial offers from the salesmen that were $72 5 above the dealer’s invoice (that is, what the dealer paid for the car from the manufacturer). White women got initial offers of $93 5 above invoice. Black women were quoted a price, on average, of $1,195 above invoice. And black men? Their initial offer was $1,687 above invoice. Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $1,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayres’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.

What should we make of this? Are the car salesmen of Chicago incredible sexists and bigots? That’s certainly the most extreme explanation for what happened. In the car-selling business, if you can convince someone to pay the sticker price (the price on the window of the car in the showroom), and if you can talk them into the full premium package, with the leather seats and the sound system and the aluminum wheels, you can make as much in commission off that one gullible customer as you might from half a dozen or so customers who are prepared to drive a hard bargain. If you are a salesman, in other words, there is a tremendous temptation to try to spot the sucker. Car salesmen even have a particular word to describe the customers who pay the sticker price. They’re called a lay-down. One interpretation of Ayres’s study is that these car salesmen simply made a blanket decision that women and blacks are lay-downs. They saw someone who wasn’t a white male and thought to themselves, “Aha! This person is so stupid and naive that I can make a lot of money off them.”

This explanation, however, doesn’t make much sense. Ayres’s black and female car buyers, after all, gave one really obvious sign after another that they weren’t stupid and naive. They were college-educated professionals. They had high-profile jobs. They lived in a wealthy neighborhood. They were dressed for success. They were savvy enough to bargain for forty minutes. Does anything about these facts suggest a sucker? If Ayres’s study is evidence of conscious discrimination, then the car salesmen of Chicago are either the most outrageous of bigots (which seems unlikely) or so dense that they were oblivious to every one of those clues (equally unlikely). I think, instead, that there is something more subtle going on here. What if, for whatever reason — experience, car-selling lore, what they’ve heard from other salesmen — they have a strong automatic association between lay-downs and women and minorities? What if they link those two concepts in their mind unconsciously, the same way that millions of Americans link the words “Evil” and “Criminal” with “African American” on the Race IAT, so that when women and black people walk through the door, they instinctively think “sucker”?

These salesmen may well have a strong conscious commitment to racial and gender equality, and they would probably insist, up and down, that they were quoting prices based on