Americans are less likely to respond to a request for help from a Black person than from a white person, according to a new study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study describes itself as the first to experimentally test for racial discrimination in the real-world behavior of a large, nationally representative sample of the public.
In the study, researchers sent identical emails to 250,000 people, requesting that they click a link to participate in a political survey. But there was one difference. For half of the recipients, the email appeared to come from a white sender. And for the other half, the sender appeared to be Black.
The results were what the researchers expected. The odds that an email from a white sender got a response were 15.5% higher than the odds of a response to a Black person. This held true for Americans of all ethnic and racial groups except for Black people, who were just as likely to respond to emails from Black senders. 
Dr. Ray Block Jr.
Although not responding to email survey requests from strangers is a common behavior across all races and ethnicities, the researchers described the racial differences in their results as an example of “papercut discrimination,” small, everyday instances of bias that add up over time.
“It’s the idea that one papercut is annoying, [but] many papercuts can be devastating” said Dr. Ray Block Jr., an associate professor of political science and African-American studies at Penn State University and the lead author of the study.
