The Right Type
Social bias blind spots: Attractiveness bias is seemingly tolerated because people fail to notice the bias
Bastian Jaeger, Gabriele Paolacci & Johannes Boegershausen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Discrimination remains a key challenge for social equity. A prerequisite for effective individual and societal responses to discrimination is that instances of it are detected. Yet, prejudice and discriminatory intent are rarely directly observable and the presence of discrimination has to be inferred from circumstantial evidence, such as the over- or underrepresentation of certain individuals (i.e., statistical bias). Here, we study how people judge outcomes that are statistically biased along different dimensions. Six primary and two supplemental studies with Dutch and U.S. participants (total N = 3,591, six preregistered) show that gender- and race-biased outcomes are perceived as much less fair than unbiased outcomes, but we do not observe the same for attractiveness-biased outcomes. While this pattern is partly explained by differences in the perceived legitimacy of different biases (i.e., people judge attractiveness bias as more acceptable than gender and race bias), we also find consistent evidence for an additional mechanism. People spontaneously pay attention to a few salient dimensions, such as gender and race, when scrutinizing decision outcomes for bias. Statistical bias along less salient dimensions, such as physical attractiveness, is more likely to go undetected. Our findings suggest that the (seeming) tolerance of attractiveness-biased outcomes is partly explained by people’s failure to spontaneously notice that the outcome is attractiveness-biased in the first place. In other words, it is possible that people show muted responses to a biased outcome not because they actually approve of it, but because they fail to notice the bias.
Status Threat, Partisanship, and Voters’ Conservative Shift Toward Right-Wing Candidates
Diogo Ferrari & Brianna Smith
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research indicates that support for conservatism increases when individuals perceive threat to their group’s social status -- i.e., prestige and respect. However, the causal link between status threat and increased electoral support for conservative candidates has not been established. Most prior studies rely on observational data, and it remains unclear how the effect of status threat on candidate support varies depending on the specific conservative policies adopted by candidates. Additionally, previous research has not fully addressed whether and how these effects are constrained by voters’ party loyalty. This article investigates these questions by conducting a joint experiment combining vignette and conjoint designs. White Americans were randomly exposed to status threat communication, and then choose between different hypothetical candidates with varying degrees of conservatism on various issues. The results show large effects of candidates’ issue positions and partisanship, but very little effect of status threat.
Racialized Misinformation, Factual Corrections, and Prejudicial Attitudes: The Cases of Welfare and Immigration
Eddy Yeung & Joseph Glasgow
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Misunderstandings about marginalized social groups are widespread among the American public and can play an important role in shaping outgroup prejudice. Does correcting racialized misperceptions about marginalized groups mitigate prejudicial attitudes? To test the impact of factual corrections, we conduct three preregistered survey experiments in the US (N = 8,306). Study 1 and Study 2 draw on the case of welfare and inform respondents that the share of Black welfare recipients is lower than that of White recipients. Study 3 focuses on the case of immigration and informs respondents that immigrants’ crime rate is lower than natives’ crime rate. Across three well-powered experiments, we estimate null to minuscule effects of factual corrections on multiple measures of prejudice -- although our informational interventions significantly reduced misperceptions about Blacks and immigrants. These findings illuminate the scope conditions of factual corrections’ efficacy in improving citizens’ attitudes toward minority groups and have implications for scholarship on belief-attitude relationships.
Are Juries Racially Discriminatory? Evidence from the Race-Blind Charging of Grand Jury Defendants with and without Racially Distinctive Names
Mark Hoekstra, Suhyeon Oh & Meradee Tangvatcharapong
NBER Working Paper, August 2025
Abstract:
We implement five different tests of whether grand juries, which are drawn from a representative cross-section of the public, discriminate against Black defendants when deciding to prosecute felony cases. Three tests exploit that while jurors do not directly observe defendant race, jurors do observe the “Blackness” of defendants’ names. All three tests -- an audit-study-style test, a traditional outcome-based test, and a test that estimates racial bias using blinded/unblinded comparisons after purging omitted variable bias -- indicate juries do not discriminate based on race. Two additional tests indicate racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap.
Through the lens of race: Accounting for majority-minority relations in cross-race categorization and individuation
Verena Heidrich & Roland Imhoff
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2025
Abstract:
Race is a fundamental organizing principle along which many societies differentiate their members, as is prominently the case for Black and White individuals in the United States (US). This dominance is also mirrored in individuals' spontaneous tendency to see a group of individuals as exemplars of racial categories. Traditional models of intergroup cognition suggest that people better remember in-group members (the cross-race-effect, CRE) and more quickly and accurately categorize out-group members (the other-race categorization advantage, ORCA) due to differences in perceptual salience and functional relevance. However, these findings were mainly based on White populations and may therefore not fully capture the perceptions of racialized minorities, such as Black individuals in the US. Given their markedly different experiences with systemic inequality, minority group members may individuate majority group members to the same extent as, or even more than, their in-group. The present research examined cross-race categorization and individuation among Black and White US Americans (N = 511) using the “Who Said What?” task (Taylor et al., 1978) combined with multinomial processing tree modeling (Klauer & Wegener, 1998). White participants showed stronger out-group categorization and in-group individuation, aligning with the traditional intergroup perspective. In contrast, Black participants displayed attenuated or reversed patterns, favoring in-group categorization and out-group individuation. While interracial contact and perceived racial identity threat had no effects, racial identification amplified racial categorization in White participants and reinforced the individuation of Black faces among Black participants. These findings underscore the importance of considering racialized majority-minority dynamics in models of intergroup cognition.
Unheard Voices: The Importance of Intersectionality in Responsiveness and the Systematic Ignoring of Black Men by Elected Officials
Ethan Busby et al.
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
All citizens are not listened to equally, despite the importance of responsiveness and listening to different theories of democracy. We take an intersectional approach to make several novel predictions about how citizens’ identities, the topic of constituent messages, and the identities of elected officials combine to influence responsiveness. These theories lead us to expect (and empirically confirm) that Black men in particular -- more than other racial and gender groups -- are systematically ignored by elected officials. We implement a wide-scale experiment with U.S. local elected officials (N = 23,738) to test our predictions. Extending previous work, we vary the race, gender, and topic of the constituent’s message, and we observe if elected officials both open and reply to constituents’ messages. We find that Black men are systematically ignored, regardless of the message they send. In contrast, elected officials respond less to Black women when they discuss race and less to White women when they discuss gender. We discuss the implications of this study for work on responsiveness in democratic government.
From bias to bliss: Racial preferences and worker productivity in tennis
Carsten Creutzburg, Wolfgang Maennig & Steffen Mueller
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of differences in consumers' racial preferences on worker productivity through the example of the home advantage (HA) effect using data on wins in men's tennis from 2001 to 2020 (pre-COVID-19). We identify players' racial affiliation as one of five distinct groups by combining clustering and facial recognition methods. Our empirical design allows us to distinguish among HA factors related to the presence of fans, referee bias, travel fatigue, and home-court familiarity. We provide evidence of social environments where Black players benefit more strongly from fan support than players of other races do, resulting in increased productivity.
Gun purchase interest as backlash to Black Lives Matter protests
Masha Krupenkin, Elad Yom-Tov & David Rothschild
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do protests affect Americans’ gun ownership decisions? Using a novel dataset of gun-related web searches in combination with geocoded protest data, we examine the effects of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests on Americans’ interest in firearm purchase. We find a clear relationship between geographic proximity to BLM protests and firearm purchase web searches, but a null relationship between these searches and proximity to re-opening protests. We then examine racial attitudes of would-be gun buyers using users’ web search histories and find that users exposed to racially conservative narratives had significantly larger spikes in gun purchase interest during the 2020 BLM protests than did other comparable searchers. These results suggest that Black civil rights protests can serve as a catalyst for gun purchase interest.