In this episode, we interview Barbara Kiviat, assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University. She is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. We discuss with Kiviat her recent article, "The Moral Affordances of Construing People as Cases: How Algorithms and the Data They Depend on Obscure Narrative and Noncomparative Justice," which won distinguished article award with the AMSS section.

In the article, Kiviat analyzes how algorithms depend on rendering people as cases, which carries consequences for moral reasoning as well because different moral standards require different information. While rendering people as cases affords adjudications of comparative justice, parsing noncomparative justice often necessitates narrative.

Kiviat summarizes the article here:

http://www.wipsociology.org/2023/11/24/the-moral-ramifications-of-how-algorithms-see-people/

Read the article here:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07352751231186797