Age Bias in Selection Decisions: The Role of Facial Appearance and Fitness Impressions

Kaufmann, Michèle; Krings, Franciska; Zebrowitz, Leslie A.; Sczesny, Sabine

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02065

Cited by 23 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(67 reference statements)

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“…However, our research revealed that appearance is especially important when no information or only a little other information is available (Olivola et al, 2012). In line with previous research, we would expect the impact of facial appearance on leader selection to decrease when information about competence is available because competence-related information should have a greater impact on selection decisions (Kaufmann et al, 2017). Although facial appearance had an impact on women’s chances of getting more nominations in the leadership contest in this study, we would expect this effect to diminish in the medium and long terms after women have entered the work place.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Women Who Emerge as Leaders in Temporarily Assigned Work Groups: Attractive and Socially Competent but Not Babyfaced or Naïve?

2018

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The underrepresentation of women in top positions has been in the spotlight of research for decades. Prejudice toward female leaders, which decreases women’s chances of emerging as leaders, has been discussed as a potential reason. Aiming to investigate the underlying mechanisms of this prejudice, we focused on the question of how facial characteristics might influence women’s leadership emergence. Because other research has related ascribed social competence and ascribed naïveté to attractiveness and babyfacedness, respectively, we hypothesized that ascribed social competence would mediate the impact of ascribed attractiveness on leadership emergence and that ascribed naïveté would mediate the impact of ascribed babyfacedness on leadership emergence. In a pilot study, we analyzed data from 101 participants of a women’s leadership contest held in 2015 in Germany. We then confirmed these results in a methodologically improved main study on other women who participated in the contest in one of two other years: 2016 and 2017 (N = 195). Women applied to participate in the contest by recording their answers to several questions in a video interview. In the contest, they were assigned to teams of about ten women each and worked on several assessment-center-like tasks. After each task, each member of each team nominated the three women they believed showed the best leadership potential in their group. We operationalized women’s leadership emergence as the number of nominations received. We measured participants’ facial attractiveness, babyfacedness, social competence, and naïveté by having raters follow a specifically developed rating manual to rate the answers the women gave in the video interviews. In both studies, the results indicated that women with higher ascribed facial attractiveness had higher ascribed social competence, which significantly predicted leadership emergence in the contest. Likewise, women with higher ascribed babyfacedness had higher ascribed naïveté, which significantly, albeit only slightly, negatively predicted leadership emergence. We discuss the implications of the results for personnel selection.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Women Who Emerge as Leaders in Temporarily Assigned Work Groups: Attractive and Socially Competent but Not Babyfaced or Naïve?

2018

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“…We want to point out that the profiles only included positive traits and that it is often argued that emphasizing positive traits may be effective in counteracting ageism (e.g., Kaufmann et al., 2017; Levy, 1996, 2017). However, in our study positive old traits resulted in discriminatory behavior when compared to neutral or young traits.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit and explicit age cues influence the evaluation of job applications

Kleissner

Jahn

2020

J Applied Social Pyschol

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In the hiring process, older job seekers are often at a disadvantage when compared to younger job seekers: They receive less callbacks to applications, less invitations to job interviews, and fewer job offers. This phenomenon has often been demonstrated by varying explicit cues such as the date of birth. Less studied, but also influential are implicit age cues (e.g., age‐stereotypic characteristics or activities in applicant profiles). Across a series of three studies, we addressed both forms of age cues in job applications. We explored the influence of explicit age information (20 years or 60 years) and implicit age profiles (age‐neutral, young, or old job‐relevant characteristics) on hiring decisions in hypothetical scenarios and tested the effect of a short anti‐discrimination prompt. Applicants’ age (i.e., the explicit age cue) reduced the hiring likelihood ratings irrespective of implicit age profiles. The implicit age profiles influenced the hypothetical hiring decisions by their age association and by the stereotypical relevance of individual characteristics (e.g., charismatic as an age‐neutral characteristic is stereotypically relevant for a leadership position). Applicants with an implicit old profile were less likely hired than applicants with an implicit young profile when the hiring goal was to increase profit and when no particular job status was specified. The anti‐discrimination prompt significantly reduced age discrimination. Ageism in the hiring process is not only a matter of explicit age cues, but also of implicit age cues. Raising awareness for ageism and prompting to disregard age could well diminish discriminatory behavior also in real hiring decisions.

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“…Various studies have found that age prejudice has a negative impact on older adults in a variety of domains, including in the medical care they receive, their experiences in the workplace, and their mental functioning (e.g., Avolio & Barrett, 1987;Barakat et al, 1999;Barber & Mather, 2013;Kagan & Melendez-Torres, 2015;Kaufmann et al, 2017;Rupp et al, 2006). Furthermore, those who hold biases against older adults are also affected negatively by their own biases-primarily as it relates to health and well-being (Levy et al, 2009(Levy et al, , 2016Levy & Myers, 2004;Levy, Zonderman, et al, 2012).…”

Section: Bias Against Older Adultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Cultural Comparisons in Implicit and Explicit Age Bias

Ackerman

Chopik

2020

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

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Most research documenting bias against older adults has been conducted in individualistic and industrialized cultures. In the current study, we examined cultural variation in attitudes toward older adults and subjective age in a large sample of 911,982 participants ( Mage = 27.42, SD = 12.23; 67.6% women) from 68 different countries ( Msize = 12,077; Mdnsize = 425.5). We hypothesized that age bias would be lower among those living in highly collectivistic countries. We found that living in collectivistic countries was associated with less implicit and explicit age bias, and greater feelings of warmth toward older adults compared with highly individualistic countries. Given the impact of age bias and prejudice on both the targets and perpetrators of bias, further research is needed to examine the causes of and interventions for bias against older adults.

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Age Bias in Selection Decisions: The Role of Facial Appearance and Fitness Impressions

Cited by 23 publications

References 45 publications

Women Who Emerge as Leaders in Temporarily Assigned Work Groups: Attractive and Socially Competent but Not Babyfaced or Naïve?

Women Who Emerge as Leaders in Temporarily Assigned Work Groups: Attractive and Socially Competent but Not Babyfaced or Naïve?

Implicit and explicit age cues influence the evaluation of job applications

Cross-Cultural Comparisons in Implicit and Explicit Age Bias

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