“1. If you want to understand why Gamergate has blown up, you could start with a recent study by Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood. They handed 1,000 people some sample student resumes and asked them to decide which deserved a scholarship. The resumes included clues to both the race and the political orientation of the applicant, as well as information about their grades.
2. Race mattered. But political orientation mattered even more. Democrats and Republicans chose the resumes that shared their politics roughly 80 percent of the time. Of course, it’s the grades themselves that should have driven the decisions — but the activation of political identity made grades pretty much irrelevant. “We found no evidence that partisans took academic merit into account,” the researchers wrote.”
Read the full article at Vox: Gamergate and the politicization of absolutely everything, by Ezra Klein
