Dual pathways to bias: Evaluators’ ideology and ressentiment independently predict racial discrimination in hiring contexts.

Abstract

Despite organizations’ professed commitment to fairness, thousands of employees file race-based discrimination claims every year. The current article examines how people deviate from impartiality when evaluating candidates in hiring decisions. Researchers have argued the ideological endorsement of elitism (i.e., scoring high in social dominance orientation) can lead to discrimination against racial minorities. We examined whether an opposing ideological commitment—egalitarianism—can also produce partiality, but in favor of minority applicants. Inspired by dual processing models and Nietzsche’s philosophical theorizing, we also forwarded and tested a novel, affective predictor of racial biases in evaluation: ressentiment toward the socially powerful. Across 4 studies, we found evaluators’ ideologies and ressentiment independently shaped evaluations of equally qualified candidates in hiring contexts. Participants who endorsed elitism showed a preference for White candidates, whereas those who endorsed egalitarianism evaluated Black candidates more favorably. Individuals who experienced stronger ressentiment toward the social elite also preferred Black over White applicants. Studies 3 and 4 tested and supported a novel intervention—inducing a calculative mindset—as a method for attenuating evaluators’ ideological and ressentiment driven impartiality.

Intuition as Emergence: Bridging Psychology, Philosophy and Organizational Science

“…So the article has formed the basis of a number of subsequent influential literature reviews, conceptual contributions, and methodological and empirical works; drawing from it, scholars have differentiated intuition from related constructs (Hodgkinson et al, 2008(Hodgkinson et al, , 2009aSadler-Smith, 2010, 2015Salas et al, 2010;Blume and Covin, 2011;Akinci and Sadler-Smith, 2012, 2013, 2020Baldacchino, 2013Baldacchino, , 2019Baldacchino et al, 2015;Healey et al, 2015;Pratt and Crosina, 2016;Calabretta et al, 2017;Okoli et al, 2021;Sadler-Smith et al, 2021). In addition, the article has spread over psychology and neuroscience (Hodgkinson et al, 2008;Hogarth, 2010;Gore and Sadler-Smith, 2011;Hodgkinson and Healey, 2011;Ben-Soussan et al, 2020;Keck and Tang, 2020;Korteling and Toet, 2020;Li et al, 2020;Stephens et al, 2020;West et al, 2020;Muñoz-Cobos and Postigo-Zegarra, 2021;Reynolds et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2021), as well as distant disciplinary domains, such as medicine and health sciences (Glatzer et al, 2020;Cameron and Singh, 2021;Chlupsa et al, 2021) or engineering and design (Cash and Maier, 2021;de Rooij et al, 2021;Paige et al, 2021;…”

Identifying the linguistic markers of intuition in human resource (HR) practice

“…The literature on implicit attitudes and unconscious biases suggests that intuition, especially in areas such as employee selection, is a potential source of bias, prejudice and discrimination (Buchtel & Norenzayan, 2008; Goings et al., 2021; Kausel et al., 2016; Reynolds et al., 2020). The fact that intuition is a potential source of unconscious biases, for example, relating to gender, creates problems for organisations because it may pass unnoticed in seemingly gender‐neutral practices (see Ugarte & Rubery, 2021).…”

The dark side of leave: how voluntary leave shapes preferences for male and female supervisors

“…Thus, we believe this intervention is a good first step in identifying ways to de-bias individuals. However, we encourage future research to examine additional methods, such as inducing a calculative mindset (Reynolds et al. , 2021).…”