CAREER: Engineering opportunity: Manipulating choice architecture to attenuate social bias

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Many of society's most significant social decisions are made over sets of individuals. For example, hiring decisions typically involve the evaluation of a set of job candidates; housing decisions involve selection from among a set of applicants; voting decisions are made from among a set of candidates running for office. Rational theories of choice suggest that decision makers' preferences between any two options within a set should remain the same regardless of the number or the quality of other options. Yet, research has shown that people's preferences for each option in a choice set shift in predictable ways depending on the other available alternatives. We see this in the study of consumer behavior, for example, where the introduction of a third inferior product changes consumers' preferences for the two original products (the so-called "decoy effect"). When choices involve other people, social stereotypes and associated emotions often lead to systematic discrimination, especially against marginalized social groups. In this project, investigator Mina Cikara of Harvard University examines how the construction of choice sets -- choice architecture -- influences discrimination. Most past efforts to reduce bias in social decisions have focused on changing perceivers' stereotypes and prejudices. In contrast, this project focuses on changing the context in which choices are presented as a way to reduce discrimination. Drawing from formal models of decision making in cognitive psychology and computational biology, the research addresses a major gap in knowledge about the role of choice architecture in discrimination and provides insights that may reduce discriminatory practices in a variety of consequential social contexts.This project adopts an inter-disciplinary approach, integrating methods and findings from cognitive and social psychology, neuroeconomics, and computational biology to examine a neglected, but potentially powerful source of discrimination reduction: choice architecture. Formal models of decision-making make specific predictions about both the mechanisms by which social "decoys" should influence decisions and the temporal dynamics underlying the decision process. Integrating insights from these models into the study of social-decision making allows for greater predictive precision and stimulates innovative strategies for reducing bias. A series of experiments and field studies in the domains of hiring, housing, and voting decisions test whether social decoys can increase decision-makers' preferences for groups that are otherwise disadvantaged (e.g., elderly, racial minorities, women). Further experiments use participants' susceptibility to decoy effects to quantify the influence of demographic and stereotype-related attributes on social decision-making. A final set of experiments manipulate participants' exposure to targets' attribute information to move toward bias-reduction interventions that do not require fabricating or selectively including social decoys in choice sets. This research program provides training to a diverse group of students. The research results will be broadly disseminated, with special efforts to reach managers in industry. Many points of contact are made with other areas of scientific inquiry, including neuroscience, sociology, economics and biology. The project offers broad societal impacts, including the opportunity for public and private institutions to gain insight into shaping policy that can reduce social bias at many different scales.