Why Do Employers Discriminate? The Role of Implicit and Explicit Racial Attitudes

• In Event: 123 - Section on Social Psychology Refereed Roundtable Session (co-sponsored with Section on Sociology of Emotions and Section on Sociology of Mental Health).
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Prejudicial Attitudes

Abstract

Sociologists have documented pervasive employer discrimination against black applicants. In a variety of settings, black applicants were less likely to receive a callback or job offer than equally qualified white applicants. Despite the growing consensus about the existence of employer discrimination, we know little about the causes of employers’ discriminatory behavior. In this paper, I focus on the role of intrapsychic factors. Drawing on an original experiment with a sample of white hiring agents, I examine whether hiring agents’ racial attitudes affect their evaluation of white and black job applicants. In studying racial attitudes, a common concern is social desirability bias: respondents may not be willing to report their true racial attitudes. However, widespread egalitarian norms may also distort explicitly reported racial attitudes. Due to these norms, individuals may frame their actions to themselves in non-prejudiced ways. This suggests a disparity in how individuals view themselves in explicit and implicit cognition, and may reduce the utility of explicit measures of racial attitudes to predict discrimination. Consequently, I examine hiring agents’ explicit and implicit attitudes. I find that over four-fifths of white hiring agents have implicit preferences for blacks over whites, and that a large minority (approximately 1/3) of white hiring agents explicitly endorse negative stereotypes of blacks relative to whites. Furthermore, I find that implicit, but not explicit, attitudes predict employers’ evaluations of black applicants, relative to white applicants. However, I find no evidence that explicit attitudes, as measured through affect and stereotypes, predict employers’ evaluations of job applicants.

Author

• Fabiana Silva, University of California Berkeley