Dolly Chugh

Pervasiveness and correlates of implicit attitudes and stereotypes

http://implicit.harvard.edu/ was created to provide experience with the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a procedure designed to measure social knowledge that may operate outside awareness or control. Significant by-products of the websites existence are large datasets contributed to by the sites many visitors. This article summarises data from more than 2.5 million completed IATs and self-reports across 17 topics obtained between July 2000 and May 2006. In addition to reinforcing several published findings with a heterogeneous sample, the data help to establish that: (a) implicit preferences and stereotypes are pervasive across demographic groups and topics, (b) as with self-report, there is substantial inter-individual variability in implicit attitudes and stereotypes, (c) variations in gender, ethnicity, age, and political orientation predict variation in implicit and explicit measures, and (d) implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes are related, but distinct.

How Can Decision Making Be Improved

The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to 50 years of research by judgment and decision-making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This article argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision-making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this article organizes the existing literature pertaining to improvement strategies and highlights promising directions for future research.

Bounded Ethicality as a Psychological Barrier to Recognizing Conflicts of Interest

But there is a more subtle question of conflict of interest that derives directly from human bounded rationality. The fact is, if we become involved in a particular activity and devote an important part of our lives to that activity, we will surely assign it a greater importance and value than we would have prior to our involvement with it. Its very hard for us, sometimes, not to draw from such facts a conclusion that human beings are rather dishonest creatures…. Yet most of the bias that arises from human occupations and preoccupations cannot be described correctly as rooted in dishonesty – which perhaps makes it more insidious than if it were. – Herbert A. Simon, 1983, pp. 95–96 Herbert Simons perspective (1983) is broadly compatible with Moore, Loewenstein, Tanlu, and Bazermans (2003) recent research on the psychological aspects of conflict of interest in the context of auditor independence. Moore et al. (2003) focus primarily on the work on self-serving interpretations of fairness. The current work broadens this theme, and develops a conceptual framework for understanding how unchecked psychological processes work against an objective assessment and allow us to act against personal, professional, and normative expectations when conflicts of interest exist.

Bounded Ethicality: The Perils of Loss Framing

Ethical decision making is vulnerable to the forces of automaticity. People behave differently in the face of a potential loss versus a potential gain, even when the two situations are transparently identical. Across three experiments, decision makers engaged in more unethical behavior if a decision was presented in a loss frame than if the decision was presented in a gain frame. In Experiment 1, participants in the loss-frame condition were more likely to favor gathering “insider information” than were participants in the gain-frame condition. In Experiment 2, negotiators in the loss-frame condition lied more than negotiators in the gain-frame condition. In Experiment 3, the tendency to be less ethical in the loss-frame condition occurred under time pressure and was eliminated through the removal of time pressure.

What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations

Little is known about how discrimination manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations or how it varies within and between organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities prior to applying to a doctoral program. Names of students were randomly assigned to signal gender and race (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese), but messages were otherwise identical. We hypothesized that discrimination would appear at the informal “pathway�? preceding entry to academia and would vary by discipline and university as a function of faculty representation and pay. We found that when considering requests from prospective students seeking mentoring in the future, faculty were significantly more responsive to Caucasian males than to all other categories of students, collectively, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions. Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and discrimination were uncorrelated, a finding that suggests greater representation cannot be assumed to reduce discrimination. This research highlights the importance of studying decisions made before formal entry points into organizations and reveals that discrimination is not evenly distributed within and between organizations.We provide evidence from the field that levels of discrimination are heterogeneous across contexts in which we might expect to observe bias. We explore how discrimination varies in its extent and source through an audit study including over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 258 institutions. Faculty in our field experiment received meeting requests from fictional prospective doctoral students who were randomly assigned identity-signaling names (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese; male, female). Faculty response rates indicate that discrimination against women and minorities is both prevalent and unevenly distributed in academia. Discrimination varies meaningfully by discipline and is more extreme in higher paying disciplines and at private institutions. These findings raise important questions for future research about how and why pay and institutional characteristics may relate to the manifestation of bias. They also suggest that past audit studies may have underestimated the prevalence of discrimination in the United States. Finally, our documentation of heterogeneity in discrimination suggests where targeted efforts to reduce discrimination in academia are most needed and highlights that similar research may help identify areas in other industries where efforts to reduce bias should focus. JEL Codes: D03, J71, I20 *We thank Max Bazerman, Eric Bradlow, Stephan Meier, Ruth Milkman, Michael Norton and Amanda Pallais for their insightful feedback. We also thank seminar participants at Cornell, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Columbia, NYU, Rutgers, the 2010 Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference, the 2011 Behavioral Economics Annual Meeting, the 2011 Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, the 2011 Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making Conference, and the 2011 Academy of Management Conference. We are grateful to Fabiano Prestes, Stan Liu, and many incredible RAs for their research assistance. This research was conducted with support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund. All data collection and analysis was conducted by the first two authors with IRB approval.

Temporal Distance and Discrimination An Audit Study in Academia

Through a field experiment set in academia (with a sample of 6,548 professors), we found that decisions about distant-future events were more likely to generate discrimination against women and minorities (relative to Caucasian males) than were decisions about near-future events. In our study, faculty members received e-mails from fictional prospective doctoral students seeking to schedule a meeting either that day or in 1 week; students’ names signaled their race (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese) and gender. When the requests were to meet in 1 week, Caucasian males were granted access to faculty members 26% more often than were women and minorities; also, compared with women and minorities, Caucasian males received more and faster responses. However, these patterns were essentially eliminated when prospective students requested a meeting that same day. Our identification of a temporal discrimination effect is consistent with the predictions of construal-level theory and implies that subtle contextual shifts can alter patterns of race- and gender-based discrimination.

Leveraging mindsets to promote academic achievement: Policy recommendations

The United States must improve its students’ educational achievement. Race, gender, and social class gaps persist, and, overall, U.S. students rank poorly among peers globally. Scientific research shows that students’ psychology—their “academic mindsets”—have a critical role in educational achievement. Yet policymakers have not taken full advantage of cost-effective and well-validated mindset interventions. In this article, we present two key academic mindsets. The first, a growth mindset, refers to the belief that intelligence can be developed over time. The second, a belonging mindset, refers to the belief that people like you belong in your school or in a given academic field. Extensive research shows that fostering these mindsets can improve students’ motivation; raise grades; and reduce racial, gender, and social class gaps. Of course, mindsets are not a panacea, but with proper implementation they can be an excellent point of entry. We show how policy at all levels (federal, state, and local) can leverage mindsets to lift the nation’s educational outcomes.

The Implications of Marriage Structure for Men’s Workplace Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors toward Women:

Based on five studies with a total of 993 married, heterosexual male participants, we found that marriage structure has important implications for attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to gender among heterosexual married men in the workplace. Specifically, men in traditional marriages—married to women who are not employed—disfavor women in the workplace and are more likely than the average of all married men to make decisions that prevent the advancement of qualified women. Results show that employed men in traditional marriages tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) perceive organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny qualified female employees opportunities for promotions more frequently than do other married male employees. Moreover, our final study suggests that men who are single and then marry women who are not employed may change their attitudes toward women in the workplace, becoming less positive. The consistent pattern of results across multiple studies employing multiple methods (lab, longitudinal, archival) and samples (U.S., U.K., undergraduates, managers) demonstrates the robustness of our findings that the structure of a man’s marriage influences his gender ideology in the workplace, presenting an important challenge to workplace egalitarianism.

Diversity at Work: Introduction: Where the sweet spot is: Studying diversity in organizations

Since 2000, 19% and 14% of the work published in peer-reviewed psychology and sociology journals (respectively) dealt with race or gender or diversity. Much of this work is based on a deep theoretical foundation and demonstrates innovative social science methods. It is rigorous, empirical, and exciting. Having established that these topics were receiving significant research attention in the social sciences, we did a similar search in the Academy of Management journals. Since 2000, only 5% of organizational research tackled these topics. What does this small percentage imply about the other 95% of organizational scholarship? What assumptions rest in most organizational work about the composition of the workforce, particularly the racial composition? In fact, most of organizational scholarship looks as if no people of color work in organizations, else we would see more attention paid to research topics such as race and racism, as well as those often entwined with race – social class, immigration status, and coping with discrimination. As of now, all of these topics remain neglected in the management literature. In this chapter, we introduce this volume about diversity at work with a focused look at the topic we see most lacking in organizational research: race. We believe this narrow focus is required, given the infrequent attention the topic is receiving in our top journals and the serious racial inequalities that exist in organizations.

Ethical learning: releasing the moral unicorn

The reality of bounded ethicality is that ethical perfection is psychologically infeasible, resulting in a gap between one’s ethical self-view and one’s actual behavior. We offer a framework for addressing this gap and improving ethical behavior. Integrating research about ethical decision-making with research about the self, we argue that self-threat is a pervasive obstacle to improving ethical behavior, particularly in organizational environments. We introduce the concept of ethical learning, defined as the active engagement in efforts to close the gap between one’s self-view and one’s actual behavior. We define ethical learners as those engaged in closing this gap, who tend to possess a central moral identity (they care about being ethical), psychological literacy (an awareness that a gap exists), and a growth mindset (the belief that purposeful effort can improve ethical behavior). We also describe an important team-level condition for translating ethical learning into improvements in ethical behavior: psychological safety (the belief that the team is a safe place for learning from failure). Our framework of ethical learning provides both individuals and organizations with a new approach to addressing bounded ethicality and improving ethical behavior.