New publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The article "A contest study to reduce attractiveness-based discrimination in social judgment" is out in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research team, led by Eliane Roy from McGill University, held a research contest of interventions designed to reduce discrimination based on physical attractiveness in a hypothetical admissions task. Lab members Lusine Grigoryan and Isabelle Weissflog developed a multiple categorization intervention to reduce attractiveness bias. Most interventions, including our own, were not successful at reducing bias. The most effective interventions largely provided concrete strategies that directed participants’ attention toward decision-relevant criteria and away from socially biasing information. The article is available on the journal's website; an open-access version of it is available through the University of York research database. 

Abstract

Discrimination in the evaluation of others is a key cause of social inequality around the world. However, relatively little is known about psychological interventions that can be used to prevent biased evaluations. The limited evidence that exists on these strategies is spread across many methods and populations, making it difficult to generate reliable best practices that can be effective across contexts. In the present work, we held a research contest to solicit interventions with the goal of reducing discrimination based on physical attractiveness using a hypothetical admissions task. Thirty interventions were tested across four rounds of data collection (total N > 20,000). Using a signal detection theory approach to evaluate interventions, we identified two interventions that reduced discrimination by lessening both decision noise and decision bias, while two other interventions reduced overall discrimination by only lessening noise or bias. The most effective interventions largely provided concrete strategies that directed participants’ attention toward decision-relevant criteria and away from socially biasing information, though the fact that very similar interventions produced differing effects on discrimination suggests certain key characteristics that are needed for manipulations to reliably impact judgment. The effects of these four interventions on decision bias, noise, or both also replicated in a different discrimination domain, political affiliation, and generalized to populations with self-reported hiring experience. Results of the contest for decreasing attractiveness-based favoritism suggest that identifying effective routes for changing discriminatory behavior is a challenge and that greater investment is needed to develop impactful, flexible, and scalable strategies for reducing discrimination.