Research Interests

Moral Strategies in Decision-making

Imagine that you are a manager of a construction company who must hire a new employee for a high-level bargaining position. Your top two final candidates happen to have very similar in qualifications and also happen to be a male and a female. If you are like most people, this is an uncomfortable situation. You are probably quite conscious of not wanting to appear biased or prejudiced. On the other hand, it is difficult to ignore social categories such as gender. How do people handle such situations?

Such selection decisions (for example, hiring a job candidate or admitting a student to a graduate program) involving ascribed social categories such as race or gender can create a dilemma for the decision-maker: although social categories tend to have a large influence on our decisions, most people feel uncomfortable using this information. In some recent research with Mike Norton and John Darley, we have found evidence that people resolve this dilemma by using social category information, but appealling to (often arbitrary) merit-based criteria when justifying their decisions.

For example, in a simulated college admissions task, participants overwhelmingly chose a Black student over a similarly qualified White student; and in a simulated hiring task, male participants favored a male candidate over a female candidate for a construction supervisor position. When asked to justify such decisions, people tended to inflate the importance of whatever arbitrary criteria happened to support their chosen candidate. However, they rarely mentioned social category information (race or gender) as an influence on their decisions.

We are currently exploring such questions as how conscious and deliberate this justification process is, and under what conditions people might feel okay in using social category information in decisions.

References:

Norton, M. I., Vandello, J. A., & Darley, J. M. (2004). Casuistry and social category bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 817-831

Norton, M. I., Sommers, S. R., Vandello, J. A., & Darley, J. M. (2006). Mixed motives and racial bias: The impact of legitimate and illegitimate criteria on decision-making. Psychology, Public Policy, & Law.

Norton, M. I., Vandello, J. A., Biga, A., & Darley, J. M. (in press). Colorblindness and diversity: Conflicting goals in decisions influenced by race. Social Cognition.

Norton, M. I., Vandello, J. A., & Biga, A. (in progress). Fear of appearing biased inhibits preferences, not inferences.

Biga, A., & Vandello, J. A. (in progress). Criticism of others’ negative behaviors in mixed-race and same-race company.

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