Influence of Raters’ Attributes on Biases Toward Immigrants

Abstract

Although immigrants offer many benefits for organizations and our society, they continue to experience unfair discrimination, prejudice, and hostility in the employment process. One contributing factor towards the negative perceptions toward immigrants are the raters' attributes (i.e., decision makers in the workplace). These attributes include their demographic background (e.g., age, gender), differences between raters' and immigrants ' cultural values, raters' personality, and raters' previous contact with immigrants. In order to understand raters' biases toward immigrants, we used the social cognition framework (Miller & Brewer, 1984) to explain the reasons for these biases, and offered hypotheses to guide future research on the issue.