Doctoral Dissertation Research: Status Ideology: How is Status Information Interpreted?

在雇佣、工资、评估和晋升方面的种族不平等是当代美国一个持续存在的问题。我们知道，隐性偏见会让白人求职者比其他种族的求职者更有优势。我们还知道，个体会通过认知努力，以再现不平等的方式，将种族差异合理化和正当化。然而，很少有研究调查无意识过程和认知过程在与工作相关的决策结果之间的相互作用。这个项目的重点是在评估求职者的种族/民族和工作能力差异时，个人是如何解释和认知信息的，以更好地理解个人是如何解释这些信息的。项目调查结果将为工作场所和政府的政策和做法提供信息，以修改和改进招聘战略，解决与工作过程关键方面有关的评估不平等问题。工作中的种族不平等是招聘推荐中存在的无意识和认知机制的部分功能。该项目采用混合方法实验设计，收集评估，生理测量和定性访谈。180名参与者将审查一组表明种族/民族和工作能力的rsamsumen，即工作技能分数，这是公司用于多样化招聘实践的工具。神经学和眼动追踪方法将被用来调查在评估过程中的内隐和认知注意，定性访谈将被用来观察决策是如何合理化的。在评估不同类型的信息（如种族/民族和工作技能分数）时，神经学方法捕捉评估者的认知注意力。眼球追踪方法将对哪些信息暗中吸引评估者的注意力进行三角测量。在180名参与者中，随机选择的30名评估者将参加定性访谈，以帮助深入了解评估者可能用于证明不平等结果的解释框架。混合方法将为社会心理学家展示研究种族不平等的关键策略；对于种族和民族学者来说，该项目将展示实验室实验的力量。项目成果将有助于与社会心理学和种族和民族社会学相关的社会学理论。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Racial inequality in hiring, wages, evaluations, and promotions is a continuing issue in the contemporary United States. We know that implicit biases advantage white job candidates over equally qualified job applicants from other racial groups. We also know that individuals exert cognitive effort to rationalize and justify racial disparities in ways that reproduce inequality. However, little research has examined the interplay between unconscious and cognitive processes in relation to decision-making outcomes related to work. This project focuses on how individuals interpret and cognitively attend to information when evaluating job applicants’ résumés that differ on race/ethnicity and work ability to better understand how individuals interpret such information. Project findings will inform workplace and governmental policies and practices to modify and improve hiring strategies that address inequality in evaluations relevant to key aspects of the work process. Racial inequality at work is a partial function of both unconscious and cognitive mechanisms that are present in hiring recommendations. This project uses a mixed-methods experimental design that collects evaluations, physiological measurements and qualitative interviews. One hundred and eighty participants will review a pair of résumés that signal race/ethnicity and work ability, i.e. work skill score, a tool used by companies to diversify their hiring practices. Neurological and eye-tracking methods will be used to investigate implicit and cognitive attention during résumé evaluations and qualitative interviews will be used to observe how decisions are rationalized. A neurological approach captures evaluators’ cognitive attention when evaluating different types of information, such as race/ethnicity and work skill scores. Eye-tracking methods will triangulate what information is implicitly capturing evaluators’ attention. Of the 180 participants, thirty randomly-selected evaluators will participate in qualitative interviews to help provide insight into the interpretive frameworks evaluators may use to justify unequal outcomes. The mixed-methods approach will demonstrate for social psychologists key strategies for studying racial inequality; for race and ethnicity scholars the project will demonstrate the power of experimentation in the laboratory. Project outcomes will contribute to sociological theories relevant to both social psychology and sociology of race and ethnicity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.