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的一个持续问题。 我们知道，与其他种族的同等资格的求职者相比，隐性偏见使白色求职者更有优势。 我们还知道，个人通过认知努力，以再现不平等的方式使种族差异合理化和正当化。然而，很少有研究探讨了无意识和认知过程之间的相互作用，与工作有关的决策结果。该项目的重点是个人如何解释和认知注意到信息时，评估求职者的简历，不同的种族/民族和工作能力，以更好地了解个人如何解释这些信息。 项目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，解决与工作流程关键方面有关的评价中的不平等问题。 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的实验设计，收集评估，生理测量和定性访谈。180名参与者将审查一对表明种族/民族和工作能力的简历，即工作技能分数，这是公司用于多样化招聘做法的工具。神经学和眼动追踪方法将用于调查简历评估期间的内隐和认知注意力，定性访谈将用于观察决策如何合理化。神经学方法在评估不同类型的信息时捕获评估者的认知注意力，例如种族/民族和工作技能分数。 眼动追踪方法将三角测量哪些信息隐含地吸引了评估者的注意力。在180名参与者中，30名随机选择的评估人员将参加定性访谈，以帮助深入了解评估人员可能用于证明不平等结果的解释框架。混合方法的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，该项目将展示实验室实验的力量。 该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.