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In recent years, social scientists have tried to find out whether important decisions are shaped by subtle biases. They've studied recruiters as they decide whom to hire. They've studied teachers, deciding which students to help at school. And they've studied doctors, figuring out what treatments to give patients. Now, researchers have trained their attention on a new group of influential people — state legislators.

Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, and graduate student Matthew Mendez wanted to see if state legislators were equally responsive to their constituents. For part of their experiment, the researchers sent emails to 1,871 legislators in 14 states with large Latino populations, asking the politicians what kind of documentation they needed to vote. They randomly assigned legislators to get the emails, but some emails came from a man named Jacob Smith, and others came from a man named Santiago Rodriguez.

"No one had really looked at sort of what underlies legislator behavior," Grose says. "Is there the possibility that legislators' own biases regarding race and ethnicity might rear their heads and that legislators might ignore Latino constituents more than white constituents?"

NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam dug into the study. Here are some highlights with some additional context.

Interview Highlights

On the study's findings

There was a difference, and the difference had a partisan tinge to it. Democrats responded about the same to both names, but Republicans were more likely to respond to the man with Anglo name rather than the Latino name. ...

Grose told me that he and Mendez decided to look a little bit deeper at the data and they found something very interesting. In many ways, the difference was less between Republicans and Democrats and more between some Republicans and other Republicans.

The researchers analyzed whether the Republicans in these states sponsored or co-sponsored voter ID laws. Now these are laws that are designed to reduce voting fraud. Critics of these laws have said that they disenfranchise minorities and others who are trying to vote for Democrats. Grose said that there was very strong correlation between Republicans who had failed to respond to the Latino constituent, and the ones who sponsored such laws.

"Republicans who support voter identification are different than those Republicans who did not support voter identification," Grose says. "Among those Republicans who did support voter ID laws, the Latino constituent was very unlikely to receive a response from their elected official. The difference was almost 40 percentage points, which is just one of the largest gaps I have ever seen."

Code Switch

How To Fight Racial Bias When It's Silent And Subtle

On how to interpret the study's implications

An implication of the study is that the same bias that caused legislators not to respond to a Latino constituent also drove them to sponsor voter ID laws ... but let me put it into context in a couple ways. The first thing is, lots of legislators — both Republicans and Democrats — did not get back to either Jacob or Santiago. So if a legislator is unresponsive, it does not automatically mean that he or she is biased.

Second, this research does not establish cause and effect when it comes to voter ID laws. It's fair to say the Republicans who sponsored such bills seem to be biased when it comes to responding to the Latino name versus the Anglo name.

But we don't know if that bias is what prompted them to sponsor the voter ID laws. That might be an inference, that might be a correlation, but it's not a proven fact.

Did you hear the one about the McDonald's hamburger that still hadn't decomposed after 14 years?

And "pink slime" — how much goes into McDonald's beef?

Over the years, fast-food behemoth McDonald's has faced some pretty disturbing questions about the ingredients that go into its meals. And lately, its North American sales have been slumping. That may have something to do with the growing ranks of consumers asking pesky questions about what Big Food is feeding them.

So perhaps it's not so surprising that this week, McDonald's USA decided to tell the public, all right, we're throwing open the doors. On Monday, the company launched "Your Questions, Our Food," a new advertising blitz aimed at dispelling the rumors and convincing consumers it has nothing to hide.

This new tell-all, social media-based approach — "in many ways, it's the way the world is going," Ben Stringfellow, vice president of communications for McDonald's USA, told the Associated Press.

As part of that effort, the company is inviting questions via Facebook and Twitter. And it has enlisted the help of Grant Imahara, former co-host of the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, to help address some of the most persistent concerns. In a video posted on the company's website, Imahara tours a factory in Fresno, Calif., run by Cargill, which supplies the beef used in McD's burgers.

During the tour, we learn that no, there are no eyeballs or lips in the meat and no, there's no ammonia or lean, finely textured beef (the so-called pink slime), either.

"Beef in and beef out — nothing else is added," one Cargill worker tells Imahara.

McDonald's/YouTube

What the video fails to mention is that yes, McDonald's burgers at one point did contain lean, finely textured beef, though the company phased it out in 2011. The company does acknowledge this in a longer Q&A on its website, which addresses other unsavory issues, like the fact that most of its beef comes from cattle treated with hormones.

The new campaign follows similar efforts to pull back the curtain at McDonald's Australian and Canadian divisions, which released a highly publicized video that let us witness the birth of a chicken McNugget earlier this year. (Perhaps the most illuminating bit of information from that video was that the iconic chicken lumps are made in four shapes — the bell, ball, bow tie and boot.)

The shift in tone also comes as McDonald's sales falter at its U.S. stores. Same-store sales slipped 1.5 percent during the most recent fiscal quarter, and the company is having a tough time appealing to millennials. Since 2011, the number of 19- to 21-year-olds who visited a McDonald's each month has dropped by 12.9 percentage points, as the demographic flocks to fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Five Guys, according to data the restaurant consulting group Technomic gathered for The Wall Street Journal.

While consumers may welcome McDonald's move toward more transparency, some critics say what's really needed is a change in its core menu.

"Most people simply don't think of McDonald's as a healthy place to eat, despite its efforts to offer more menu choices," Civil Eats co-founder Naomi Starkman writes. In a world where farm-to-table increasingly dominates eating ethos, McDonald's is still essentially serving up "factory farm-to-table," she says.

"The truth is," she writes, "McDonald's is facing a marketplace where people no longer want fast food, but good food served fast."

Adds Sriram Madhusoodanan of Corporate Accountability International, an advocacy group that has called on McDonald's to stop marketing to kids, "Instead of addressing people's concerns with the corporation's marketing practices and food quality, McDonald's continues to double-down on advertising that simply won't make its problems go away."

Speaking of things that won't go away, remember that burger-that-never ages we mentioned? Yeah, it's scientifically possible, McDonald's has previously acknowledged, if you stored the thing in superdry conditions where bacteria and mold can't form.

chicken mcnugget

pink slime

McDonald's

Listening to Sen. Mary Landrieu's opponents, you might think President Obama was up for re-election. Tuesday night in Shreveport, the three candidates faced off in a debate for the first time.

Democrat Landrieu is waging hard-fought battle for re-election in a race that could help decide which party has control of the U.S. Senate. Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy and a tea party candidate, Rob Maness, are her main challengers in Louisiana's open primary on November 4th.

At the debate, whether the question was about fighting terrorism or curtailing student debt, Cassidy managed to tie Landrieu to the nation's top Democrat and her vote for his signature health care plan.

"We need a better economy than the Obama and the Obamacare economy. Sen. Landrieu, when she voted for Obamacare...in essence put a wet blanket over that economy," he said.

Cassidy is a physician from Baton Rouge, and is Landrieu's top challenger. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which he claims is costing consumers. "Clearly this is the unaffordable health care act," he said.

Landrieu defends her vote for the law, but says it needs some tweaks. The three-term incumbent Democrat would rather talk about positions that distinguish her from the president. Her support for the Keystone pipeline, and expanding domestic energy production, for instance – popular positions in a state where the oil and gas industry dominates.

Landrieu, chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, wants to make the race more about how her seniority can help the state.

"While President Obama is not on the ballot, the future of Louisiana is, and electing a senator that can get the job done when it comes to energy, building a middle class in our country and in Louisiana. Using my influence and my clout, which is really the people's influence and the people's clout in Louisiana," she said.

But retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness, the tea party-backed Republican in the race, calls that the "incumbent protection racket."

"You know what Senator Landrieu?" he said. "The president's policies are on the ballot and they're in your person. And we talked about energy jobs a moment ago. They're hurting energy jobs."

Maness positions himself as the true conservative in the race and has picked up the support of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

The Republican establishment is behind Cassidy. Arizona Sen. John McCain campaigned across Louisiana earlier this week, saying the Senate needs a doctor like Cassidy to help fix the broken VA.

McCain asked veterans to go on another mission "by sending Bill Cassidy to the United States Senate."

Louisiana's open primary system puts all candidates, regardless of party, on the ballot together. If no one gets a majority, the race is decided in a December runoff between the top two finishers. Most observers don't see how Landrieu can pull enough support to avoid the runoff — and a head-to-head match with a Republican candidate.

"Mary Landrieu, I would say, is in trouble," says Stephanie Grace, political columnist for the Advocate newspaper. "Not really for anything she did, for really being a Democrat in the Deep South. And that in this current environment which is very hostile to Democrats in the Deep South and President Obama."

Louisiana is a much redder state than it was when Landrieu was first elected to the Senate in 1996. She still has strong support in Democratic pockets like New Orleans, where her brother is mayor and her father once held the job. But elsewhere, she has to make the case.

On Wednesday, she stopped in Lafayette, the heart of the state's oil and gas corridor, to rally a big part of her base – women.

The message she wants them to spread is that she now holds the gavel at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

"We can write the bill, we can write the energy policy. And I have an opponent that says he wants to get to the Senate. He doesn't get this chairmanship. He'd have to stay there 18 years."

Mary Doucet of Opelousas was among the more than 400 women who turned out for today's luncheon. She says Landrieu's committee chairmanship is important. "Louisiana has been noted for a lot of natural resources so that's a plus for Louisiana. So why would you want to put somebody new there?" she asks.

Republican Cassidy counters that argument by saying Landrieu's chairmanship would be a moot point if the GOP gains control of the Senate.

In recent years, social scientists have tried to find out whether important decisions are shaped by subtle biases. They've studied recruiters as they decide whom to hire. They've studied teachers, deciding which students to help at school. And they've studied doctors, figuring out what treatments to give patients. Now, researchers have trained their attention on a new group of influential people — state legislators.

Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, and graduate student Matthew Mendez wanted to see if state legislators were equally responsive to their constituents. For part of their experiment, the researchers sent emails to 1,871 legislators in 14 states with large Latino populations, asking the politicians what kind of documentation they needed to vote. They randomly assigned legislators to get the emails, but some emails came from a man named Jacob Smith, and others came from a man named Santiago Rodriguez.

"No one had really looked at sort of what underlies legislator behavior," Grose says. "Is there the possibility that legislators' own biases regarding race and ethnicity might rear their heads and that legislators might ignore Latino constituents more than white constituents?"

NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam dug into the study. Here are some highlights with some additional context.

Interview Highlights

On the study's findings

There was a difference, and the difference had a partisan tinge to it. Democrats responded about the same to both names, but Republicans were more likely to respond to the man with Anglo name rather than the Latino name. ...

Grose told me that he and Mendez decided to look a little bit deeper at the data and they found something very interesting. In many ways, the difference was less between Republicans and Democrats and more between some Republicans and other Republicans.

The researchers analyzed whether the Republicans in these states sponsored or co-sponsored voter ID laws. Now these are laws that are designed to reduce voting fraud. Critics of these laws have said that they disenfranchise minorities and others who are trying to vote for Democrats. Grose said that there was very strong correlation between Republicans who had failed to respond to the Latino constituent, and the ones who sponsored such laws.

"Republicans who support voter identification are different than those Republicans who did not support voter identification," Grose says. "Among those Republicans who did support voter ID laws, the Latino constituent was very unlikely to receive a response from their elected official. The difference was almost 40 percentage points, which is just one of the largest gaps I have ever seen."

Code Switch

How To Fight Racial Bias When It's Silent And Subtle

On how to interpret the study's implications

An implication of the study is that the same bias that caused legislators not to respond to a Latino constituent also drove them to sponsor voter ID laws ... but let me put it into context in a couple ways. The first thing is, lots of legislators — both Republicans and Democrats — did not get back to either Jacob or Santiago. So if a legislator is unresponsive, it does not automatically mean that he or she is biased.

Second, this research does not establish cause and effect when it comes to voter ID laws. It's fair to say the Republicans who sponsored such bills seem to be biased when it comes to responding to the Latino name versus the Anglo name.

But we don't know if that bias is what prompted them to sponsor the voter ID laws. That might be an inference, that might be a correlation, but it's not a proven fact.