Authors
L Taylor Phillips, Sora Jun
Publication date
2022
Journal
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Volume
122
Issue
5
Pages
825-852
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Description
Discrimination continues to plague society, creating stark inequities between groups. While existing work has considered the role of prejudice in perpetuating discrimination, we draw on emerging research on privilege and inequity frames to offer an overlooked, complementary explanation: Objectively discriminatory decisions that are described as favoring, compared with disfavoring, are less likely to be recognized as discrimination. We further theorize this is because favoring decisions are perceived to be motivated by positive intentions. We find support for our hypotheses across eight studies. First, using both qualitative (Studies 1a-b) and experimental approaches (Studies 2–7), across a range of discrimination contexts including race, sex, nationality, and age, we find that inequity frames affect perceptions of discrimination. Further, we find that even human resource employees are less likely to recognize …
Total citations
20192020202120222023202419177
Scholar articles
LT Phillips, S Jun - Academy of Management Proceedings, 2020