What Counts as Discrimination? Third-Party Perception of Fairness In Employee Selection Decisions

What selection practices do people generally consider discriminatory? While people’s perceptions of some kinds of selection decisions have received much attention (e.g., those based on race, gender; Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Stewart & Shapiro, 2000; Perry, Davis-Blake, Kulik, 1994), other kinds of selection decisions remain under-examined, despite their documented impact on selection outcomes (e.g., those based on networks, alma mater; Rivera, 2015). Outside of well-studied discrimination dimensions, do people feel judgments based on non-demographic characteristics are unfair and discriminatory? What contributes to their lay beliefs? Here, we investigate how people judge the fairness of a wide variety of selection decisions. We theorize that people’s perception of fairness varies depending on the internality and relevance of the attribute at hand. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we first find evidence that people’s lay beliefs about discrimination form three major clusters – clearly unfair, clearly fair, and ambiguous (Study 1). In Study 2, we replicate this model and further assess the dimensions underlying these three clusters using participants’ own open-ended explanations. We find that relevance, control, and privacy are most influential when participants think about fairness. In Study 3, we use a more quantitative approach and find that perceptions of relevance, controllability, and privacy of an attribute mediate perceptions of fairness of selecting on that attribute. Finally, in Study 4, we take a different approach and ask working adults to generate selection attributes that they consider fair versus unfair (discriminatory), and explain their reasoning. We then compare these clusters to those that emerged in Studies 1- 3, finding converging evidence for the clearly unfair and ambiguous clusters.