Why benefiting from discrimination is less recognized as discrimination

• Published in: Journal of personality and social psychology Vol. 122; no. 5; p. 825
• Main Authors: Phillips, L Taylor, Jun, Sora
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.05.2022
• Subjects: Ethnicity; Humans; Prejudice
• ISSN: 1939-1315
• DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000298

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 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 discrimination when described as favoring (Study 3), in turn affecting their reporting behaviors: They are less likely to report potentially discriminatory decisions for review. Next, sampling language from U.S. Supreme Court cases, we find that people support litigation less when discrimination uses a favoring frame, versus disfavoring frame (Study 4). Then, we find that this pattern is driven by inequity frames shaping perceived intentions, rather than perceived harm (Studies 5-6). Finally, we find some evidence that inequity frames regarding a discriminatory decision committed by an organization may affect candidates' job pursuit behaviors (Study 7). This work contributes to a nascent perspective that advantaging mechanisms are critical for creating group inequity: given individuals are less likely to recognize favoritism as discriminatory, favoritism may especially contribute to the persistence of inequity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).