Social decoys: Leveraging choice architecture to alter social preferences.

Abstract

Many of society's most significant social decisions are made over sets of individuals: for example, evaluating a collection of job candidates when making a hiring decision. Rational theories of choice dictate that decision makers' preferences between any two options should remain the same irrespective of the number or quality of other options. Yet people's preferences for each option in a choice set shift in predictable ways as function of the available alternatives. These violations are well documented in consumer behavior contexts: for example, the decoy effect, in which introducing a third inferior product changes consumers' preferences for two original products. The current experiments test the efficacy of social decoys and harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set construction can be used to change preferences in a hiring context. Across seven experiments (N = 6312) we find that participants have systematically different preferences for the exact same candidate as a function of the other candidates in the choice set (Experiments 1a-1d, 2) and the salience of the candidate attributes under consideration (Experiments 2, 3a, 3b). Specifically, compromise and (often) asymmetric-dominance decoys increased relative preference for their yoked candidates when candidates were counterstereotypical (e.g., high warmth/low competence male candidate). More importantly, we demonstrate for the first time that we can mimic the effect of a decoy in the absence of a third candidate by manipulating participants' exposure to candidates' attributes: balanced exposure to candidates' warmth and competence information significantly reduced bias between the two candidates. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reducing discrimination: A bias versus noise perspective.

“…The present results suggest that part of the power of these interventions is in making errors more evenly distributed in judgment contexts (i.e., reducing bias). Finally, our results align with a more recent investigation finding that discrimination can be lessened by simply increasing the accuracy of the decision-making process (Chang & Cikara, 2018). At the same time, the present work extends these prior investigations by illustrating how warnings about potential bias can lead to reductions in the relative likelihood of certain groups receiving favorable treatment without influencing the amount of people receiving unfair treatment.…”

Gender relativism: How context shapes what is seen as male and female.

“…These findings build on recent work suggesting that choice sets and context can profoundly shape bias and social perception. From joint evaluations (Bohnet et al, 2016) to social decoys (Chang & Cikara, 2018), recent research shows that the presence and presentation of targets can change evaluations and preferences. The current work adds to this research by demonstrating that gender-neutral names do not shield against gender bias and that shaping the context and choice sets in which targets are evaluated may be a more effective way to diminish stereotyping and bias.…”

Too old to be a diversity hire. Choice bundling shown to increase gender-diverse hiring decisions fails to increase age diversity.

“…The interventions that make deliberate changes to hiring decision procedures are especially attractive because they do not involve time-consuming training programs, which often show limited success in changing stereotypes and practices (Forscher et al, 2019;Lai et al, 2016;Noon, 2018), and can undermine the inclusion of existing high-status groups (Dover et al, 2016). For example, there is a growing literature showing the potential for choice-architecture interventions in candidate presentations for increasing the selection of women to improve organizations' gender diversity (e.g., Bohnet et al, 2016;Chang & Cikara, 2018;Chang et al, 2020;Feng et al, 2020). However, these interventions have mainly focused on women and racial minorities, and it remains unclear if similar interventions can successfully increase age diversity.…”