What is it about?

Collecting evidence on the relative efficacy of dozens of interventions can be costly and time-consuming for a single research team. In this project, we created research contest with an open call for interested researchers to submit what they thought would be an effective intervention to reduce attractiveness-based discrimination in a decision-making task. Our contest tested 30 interventions submitted by teams of researchers worldwide, with four rounds of data collection involving over 20,000 participants. Four interventions were identified as most successful and reliable in reducing attractiveness-based discrimination.

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Why is it important?

Our research contest shows that intergroup bias reduction strategies are most effective when people can focus on identifying the most qualified candidates, regardless of the social groups they belong to. When participants have time to consider their evaluation criteria or are provided with criteria before evaluating candidates, they make fewer errors and display lower overall levels of discrimination.

Perspectives

These findings some offer promising news: overall discrimination can be reduced only by improving decision-making accuracy. However, these more successful interventions rely on a clear understanding of the right decision-making criteria for a given situation. In many cases, evaluators don’t know which criteria they should use before starting to review job candidates. Without this crucial insight, it remains challenging to create effective interventions that help decision-makers guide decision-makers toward less biased and more accurate judgments.

Eliane Roy
McGill University

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This page is a summary of: A contest study to reduce attractiveness-based discrimination in social judgment., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, November 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000414.
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