Opportunity Luck (Munguia Gomez, ongoing)
A common way that luck affects people’s outcomes is by giving them the opportunity to develop merit. People generally find it unfair to allocate rewards based on luck, but fair to allocate them based on merit. However, do people find it fair or unfair to allocate rewards based on luck that builds merit? This work seeks to understand how people judge fairness and how they allocate rewards in situations where luck builds merit. I find a gap between what people regard as fair and what they do. Rewarding people who were lucky to build merit is regarded to be less fair than rewarding people who simply have merit, seemingly with no influence of luck, and fairer than rewarding people who were simply lucky, but have no merit. Nevertheless, people reward those who were lucky to build merit as much as those who simply have merit. These findings help understand why people find present inequalities to be unfair but may nevertheless behave in ways that reinforce them.
How interpretations of socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage influence college admissions (Munguia Gomez, Levine, & Phillips, under review)
Why are college campuses not more socioeconomically diverse? Here we show that the way in which college applicants are evaluated based on their socioeconomic circumstances can skew admitted college classes towards the socioeconomically advantaged. In a series of experiments, we found that fewer admissions officers and lay people adjusted their evaluations of an identical applicant when they found out the applicant was advantaged than disadvantaged. We show that this asymmetry in adjustment stems from people’s beliefs about what socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage reveal about the effort applicants must exert to achieve equivalent outcomes. Finally, through simulations of college admissions outcomes under different evaluation approaches, we show that asymmetric adjustment can undermine admitting a more socioeconomically diverse class. Together, our experiments and simulations provide an additional explanation for why college campuses may struggle to diversify, despite having the stated intention and information available to do so.
People prefer to address inequalities by reducing disadvantage over advantage (Munguia Gomez, Goya-Tocchetto, & Burns, ongoing)
Inequalities are perpetuated through mechanisms that disadvantage certain groups and advantage others. While addressing inequalities can be achieved both by reducing the disadvantages experienced by some or reducing advantages enjoyed by others, we hypothesize and find support across two experiments that people are more willing to address inequalities by reducing disadvantages than advantages. In Study 1, participants rated solutions that addressed disadvantages or advantages that contributed to 10 inequalities. Participants were more supportive of solutions that addressed disadvantaging mechanisms than advantaging ones. In Study 2, participants evaluated a proposal to create more equality in a college context. Participants were more supportive of the proposal, both between and within subjects, when it was framed as reducing a disadvantage than an advantage, and even though the consequence of the proposals were identical. This work suggests that efforts to reduce inequality may be held back by people’s predisposition for how to do so.