Most real-world hiring managers spend less than 10 seconds reviewing each resume during the initial screening stage. To keep up that swift pace, they may resort to using mental shortcuts — including racial stereotypes — to assess job applications.
We found that requiring the study participants to select a worker within only 2 seconds led them to be 25% more likely to discriminate against candidates with names they perceived as Black-sounding. Similar patterns of biased decision-making under time pressure have been documented in the context of police shootings and medical decisions.
However, making decisions more slowly is not a panacea.
We found that the most important factor for whether more deliberate decisions reduce discrimination was a participant’s view on affirmative action — the consideration of race in a workforce or student body to ensure that their share of people of color is roughly proportionate to the general public or a local community.
White participants who opposed affirmative action were more than twice as likely to select an applicant with a white-sounding name compared with applicants perceived as Black — whether or not they had to make the simulated hiring decision in a hurry.
By contrast, giving white participants who favor affirmative action unlimited time to choose a name from the hiring list reduced discrimination against the job candidates with names they perceived as Black-sounding by almost half. The data showed that this decline had to do with people basing their decision more on their perceptions of a worker’s performance, rather than relying on mental shortcuts based on their perceived race.
We assessed the participants’ views on affirmative action by doing a survey at the end of this experiment.
Discrimination hasn’t gone away
A study published in 2021 suggested that hiring discrimination based on Black-sounding names had declined, although discriminatory practices remained high in some customer-facing lines of work, such as auto sales or retail.
Other research has suggested that once people learn more about someone, the discriminatory influence that a name might have begins to fade. Yet, other studies have indicated that racial biases can make the interactions needed for this learning process less likely. For example, racial biases may lead employers to refrain from interviewing – or hiring – a job candidate of color in the first place.
There is ample evidence that people of color face discrimination in many important domains beyond employment, including finding housing or obtaining loans.
Our results suggest that slowing down the initial assessment of applicants can be a first step toward reducing this type of discrimination.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Martin Abel is an assistant professor in economics at Bowdoin College and research affiliate at the IZA. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.