How old is old in allegations of age discrimination? The limitations of existing law.

Abstract

Under Title VII, courts may give a mixed motive instruction allowing jurors to determine that defendants are liable for discrimination if an illegal factor (here: race, color, religion, sex, or national origin) contributed to an adverse decision. Recently, the Supreme Court held that to conclude that an employer discriminated against a worker because of age, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, unlike Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires "but for" causality, necessitating jurors to find that age was the determinative factor in an employer's adverse decision regarding that worker. Using a national online sample (N = 392) and 2 study phases, 1 to measure stereotypes, and a second to present experimental manipulations, this study tested whether older worker stereotypes as measured through the lens of the Stereotype Content Model, instruction type (but for vs. mixed motive causality), and plaintiff age influenced mock juror verdicts in an age discrimination case. Decision modeling in Phase 2 with 3 levels of case orientation (i.e., proplaintiff, prodefendant, and neutral) showed that participants relied on multiple factors when making a decision, as opposed to just 1, suggesting that mock jurors favor a mixed model approach to discrimination verdict decisions. In line with previous research, instruction effects showed that mock jurors found in favor of plaintiffs under mixed motive instructions but not under "but for" instructions especially for older plaintiffs (64- and 74-year-old as opposed to 44- and 54-year-old-plaintiffs). Most importantly, in accordance with the Stereotype Content Model theory, competence and warmth stereotypes moderated the instruction effects found for specific judgments. The results of this study show the importance of the type of legal causality required for age discrimination cases. (PsycINFO Database Record

The public’s judgment of sex trafficked women: Blaming the victim?

“…With regard to the SCM, Fiske (2018) reviewed the now extensive body of literature that empirically supports the deep take of what she called the "Big Two" dimensions of social stereotyping (i.e., warmth and trust) and showed that across surveys, cultural investigations, laboratory experiments and biobehavioral studies, the "Big Two" go a long way to explain prejudice and discrimination. The current work adds to Wiener and Farnum's (2016) research to demonstrate how the SCM can explain in two different arenas (i.e., age discrimination and sex trafficking) the way in which stereotypes play out in judgments that people make about civil and criminal wrongdoings. The current findings are especially interesting because they agree in part with Martin and Slepian's (2020) analysis that connects the "Big Two" with a gendered perspective in which warmth aligns with the feminine and competence with the masculine.…”

“…In rich countries with greater income inequality (e.g., the United States), "poor" people were seen as less competent and "rich" people were seen as less warm. Closer to the purpose of the current investigation, Wiener and Farnum (2016) adapted the SCM method to measure stereotypes and stigma held against older workers to determine how those stereotypes would influence verdict decisions in a civil case of age discrimination. In Phase 1 of a two-phase experiment, Wiener and Farnum (2016) measured societal perceptions toward the 12 groups that Fiske et al (2002) used in their original SCM model but added an "older workers" category who also fell into the low competence/low warmth quadrant.…”

“…Closer to the purpose of the current investigation, Wiener and Farnum (2016) adapted the SCM method to measure stereotypes and stigma held against older workers to determine how those stereotypes would influence verdict decisions in a civil case of age discrimination. In Phase 1 of a two-phase experiment, Wiener and Farnum (2016) measured societal perceptions toward the 12 groups that Fiske et al (2002) used in their original SCM model but added an "older workers" category who also fell into the low competence/low warmth quadrant. In Phase 2, Wiener and Farnum (2016) tested whether endorsed stereotypes from the first Phase would impact verdict decisions.…”

“…In Phase 1 of a two-phase experiment, Wiener and Farnum (2016) measured societal perceptions toward the 12 groups that Fiske et al (2002) used in their original SCM model but added an “older workers” category who also fell into the low competence/low warmth quadrant. In Phase 2, Wiener and Farnum (2016) tested whether endorsed stereotypes from the first Phase would impact verdict decisions. Participants read a vignette that described an age discrimination lawsuit with facts that either favored the plaintiff, the defense or neither.…”

Custody Judgments, Ex‐offender Parents, and Best Interests of the Child

“…Future research should assess the stereotypes that are responsible for these stigmatized judgments more directly by using more specialized stigma measures and perhaps stereotype content modeling (Berry & Wiener, 2020; Côté‐Lussier, 2016; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Wiener & Farnum, 2016). The argument that stigma is a prominent—albeit inappropriate—factor in the custody decision‐making process, an argument that calls for a policy based correction, would be substantially strengthened if it could be shown that experimentally activated stereotypes alter custody decisions through paths that do not involve the best interests of the child.…”