Browsing by Author "Kay, Aaron C"

I investigate people's degree of preference for "blinding" in decision-making: purposefully restricting the information one sees in order to try to form a more accurate evaluation. For example, when grading her students’ papers, a professor might choose to "blind" herself to students’ names by anonymizing them, and thus evaluate the papers on content alone. I propose a theoretical framework of individual-level blinding preferences, outlining various factors that may drive evaluators’ choices to see or blind themselves to potentially biasing information in an impending evaluation. Next, I discuss 8 studies (N = 5,350) and associated replications (N = 3,720) that (a) explore individuals’ preferences for blinding and outline consequences for bias, (b) test the mechanisms driving blinding decisions proposed in my theoretical framework, and (c) explore the efficacy of multiple interventions to encourage a choice to blind one’s judgment. I find that people often choose to see potentially biasing information rather than be blind to it, even though they acknowledge they should be blind and that seeing such information will likely bias their evaluations. I also find that interventions that facilitate deliberative reflection before a blinding choice is made can encourage a choice to be blind. I discuss contributions of these studies to research on mental contamination, inequality reduction in organizations, and social perception, as well as implications of these studies for groups concerned with members’ decision bias.

Are women of color viewed as non-prototypical victims of gender and racial discrimination? What are the implications of non-prototypicality in this context? In this dissertation, I seek to answer these questions by exploring the relative gender discrimination prototypicality of three subgroups of women (i.e., White women vs. Black women and Asian women) and relative racial discrimination prototypicality of four racial subgroups (i.e., Black women vs. Black men, Asian women vs. Asian men). Further, I examine how victim non-prototypicality influences both the believability and financial remedy outcomes for those who allege discrimination.

To this end, in Chapter 1, I review the intersectional invisibility hypothesis (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008) and BIAS map framework (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2007, 2008), discussing their implications for both the believability and treatment of discrimination victims. Integrating these perspectives, I develop a series of predictions regarding Black women’s discrimination non-prototypicality, as well and its downstream consequences for the believability of their discrimination allegations and the financial remedy they receive in discrimination cases, compared to White women and Black men. Specifically, I predict that Black women’s categorical non-prototypicality will reduce the believability of their discrimination claims, but that their non-prototypical attributes will lead to divergent treatment (i.e., financial remedy awards), depending on the type of discrimination alleged.

Chapter 2 presents 9 studies that test the hypotheses outlined in Chapter 1. Leveraging discrimination data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I demonstrate both the reduced believability of Black women’s discrimination claims and the predicted divergent consequences on financial remedy they receive in gender (Study 1a) versus racial (Study 1b) discrimination cases. I then examine discrimination prototypes, as well as the attributes underlying these prototypes and the emotions they elicit, with an emphasis on prototypical warmth (Study 2). Following these studies, I explore the effects of claimant race and gender on claim believability (Studies 3a–3d), mediated by discrimination prototypicality (Studies 3a and 3b). Finally, I examine the role of prototypical warmth and the induction of pity and contempt in informing the financial remedy awarded in gender (Study 4a) and racial discrimination (Study 4b) cases.

Extending the findings presented in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 discusses how these principles may be applied to Asian women and Asian men. Here, I describe competing perspectives regarding the relative gender discrimination prototypicality of Asian women and White women and relative racial discrimination prototypicality of Asian women and Asian men. I also predict that Asian female victims of gender discrimination will be viewed as less warm and elicit less pity than White women, disadvantaging them in the financial remedy process. However, Asian women should receive more financial remedy when alleging racial discrimination than Asian men, due to increased perceptions of their warmth and their attenuated elicitation of contempt. Following this discussion, I present the results of 6 studies that examine these relationships.

In Chapter 4, I conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical contributions, limitations, and future directions for the current work. Overall, this research highlights the importance and utility of considering prototypicality at both the categorical and underlying attribute level to better understand when intersectional advantages versus disadvantages may emerge.

In our work, we suggest that racial discrimination in hiring decisions can take on different forms. Specifically, we argue that when prejudiced individuals discriminate against Black job candidates, they are not only discriminating because they hold individual negative biases about Black people. They are also – and perhaps primarily – motivated to perpetuate the current racial hierarchy. And, in order to do so, they support hiring candidates – be they Black or White – who will not disrupt a system where White people continue to be systematically advantaged. In this distinct form of discrimination – which we call racial hierarchy-based discrimination, prejudiced individuals can display a preference for hiring a Black candidate who wants to uphold the racial hierarchy over a White candidate who wants to disrupt it. Across eight experiments, we document this type of discrimination. Our results also show evidence for biased evaluations across the racial prejudice spectrum. That is, both low and high prejudice individuals can be strategic in how they pursue their goals of disrupting or maintaining the racial hierarchy. We end with a discussion of how racial hierarchy-based discrimination can lead to the appearance of racial progress, all the while keeping in place a racial power structure that systematically disadvantages Black Americans.

Although women’s underrepresentation in senior level positions in the workplace has multiple causes, women’s self-improvement or “empowerment” at work has recently attracted cultural attention as a solution. For example, the bestselling book “Lean In” states that women can tackle gender inequality themselves by overcoming the “internal barriers” (e.g., lack of confidence and ambition) that prevent success. I sought to explore the consequences of this type of women’s empowerment ideology. Study 1 found that perceptions of women’s ability to solve inequality were associated with attributions of women’s responsibility to do so. Studies 2, 3, and 5 experimentally manipulated exposure to women’s empowerment messages, finding that while such messages increase perceptions that women are empowered to solve workplace gender inequality, they also lead to attributions that women are more responsible both for creating and solving the problem. Study 4 found a similar pattern in the context of a specific workplace problem, and found that such messages also lead to a preference for interventions focused on changing women rather than changing the system. Study 5 documents the weakened effects of messages that explicitly explain that women’s “internal barriers” are the products of “external barriers” obstructing women’s progress. Study 6 found that women’s empowerment messages are not successful in helping women feel empowered, but rather make them feel more responsible for causing workplace gender inequality. Studies 7a and 7b suggest that these negative consequences go beyond women’s empowerment and also apply to empowerment of African Americans in the context of racial inequality. In sum, these findings suggest that self-improvement messages intended to empower women to take charge of gender inequality may also yield potentially harmful societal beliefs, and that the processes demonstrated with women’s empowerment messages may apply to other disadvantaged groups like African Americans.

Across nine studies, this dissertation examines whether creativity is perceived to be associated with agentic traits and explores the implications of this perceived association for gender bias and creativity evaluation. Specifically, I test whether the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction, qualities generally ascribed to men—leading to men often appearing to be more creative than women. I find that creativity tends to be popularly conceived of as involving “outside the box” divergent thinking (Pre-test) and “outside the box” creativity is more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics (i.e., daring, self-reliant) than stereotypically feminine characteristics (i.e., cooperative, supportive; Study 1). Archival evidence suggests that men’s ideas are evaluated as more ingenious than women’s ideas (Study 2). In experiments I show that a man is ascribed more creativity than a woman when both produce identical output (Study 3a and Study 3b). I also demonstrate that stereotypically masculine behavior enhances a man’s perceived creativity, while identical behavior does not enhance a woman’s perceived creativity. This boost in perceived creativity is mediated by attributions of agency, not competence, and predicts reward deservingness (Study 4). Finally, I find that the perceived agency of a target specifically predicts perceptions of his product’s novelty, not usefulness (Study 5) and that independence-based agency is perceived to be more strongly associated with creative thinking than dominance-based agency (Study 6a and Study 6b). These findings suggest that judgments of how agentic a person is (i.e., independent, self-reliant) may influence evaluations of that person’s creativity and that a gendered lay theory of creativity may be a factor hindering the achievement of gender equality in the workforce.

This dissertation examines how people’s loyalty to their groups influences their perception of harm. Specifically, people who are loyal (vs. not loyal) to their ingroup perceive negative actions by an outgroup against their group as more harmful. Three studies provided support for this hypothesis. Students loyal to their university’s basketball team perceived greater harm from its rival basketball team than those who were not (Studies 1 and 2). The effect held controlling for related group constructs, such as group identification (Studies 1 and 2), and related moral constructs, such as belief in a just world (Study 1). The association between loyalty and harm perception generalized to a country context by showing that Americans more loyal to the United States were more likely to perceive foreign tariffs as harmful (Study 3). Rather than differences in memory recall or general negative perceptions of the outgroup, this effect appeared to be due to loyalists exaggerating the perceived harm inflicted (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, as perceptions of harm increased, desire for punitive actions also increased (Study 3).

Neuroscience is increasingly used during sentencing in criminal courtrooms to mitigate punishment. However, neuroscience is not presented in a vacuum—it is generally used to describe a defendant’s neuropsychological state in the context of other mitigating circumstances. It is important to explore how decision-makers reason about neuroscience information in the courtrooms given the consequences of sentencing decisions. The present studies examine how neuroscience information presented across different mitigating contexts impacts legally relevant perceptions, including judgments of control over behavior and punishment decisions. Study 1 uses qualitative methods to explore how judges and lawyers use and reason about neuroscience information in the courts. Study 2 investigates whether neuroscience information, when paired with potentially mitigating circumstances about a defendant, differentially impacts legally relevant judgments. Study 3 assesses how the mitigating context in which neuroscience information is introduced differentially impacts causal attributions about a defendant’s behaviors. These studies offer novel insights about the use of neuroscience in the courtroom and demonstrate that the context in which this information is presented matters for the formation of legally relevant judgments.