Research
Working Papers, Published and In Press, and In Progress
Working Papers
Luck-based merit is discounted in fairness but not in choice
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It is widely accepted that unequal outcomes are deserved if they are based on merit, but not on luck. Many inequalities, however, stem from chance circumstances, like family wealth and fortunate timing, that give some people opportunities to develop skills that others lack the chance to build. I introduce the term merit luck to describe such situations. The intertwining of luck and merit makes merit luck morally ambiguous. How do people judge the fairness of selecting candidates who benefited from merit luck, and how often do they select them for coveted opportunities? Across experiments, I find a dissociation: participants judged it less fair to select merit-lucky candidates than candidates whose merit appeared self-made, but they nonetheless selected them at comparable rates. To explain the gap, I decompose merit luck into three features: whether the lucky benefit is internalized as skill, will last, and required effort. All three matter to people’s fairness judgments and selection decisions, but people give extra weight to lastingness in their selection decisions. This gap helps explain why opportunity-based inequalities persist even when recognized as unfair.
How people evaluate socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged college applicants
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Many universities aim to diversify their campuses along class lines by considering applicants’ socioeconomic circumstances. However, it is unclear how evaluations of applicants change—or do not—based on knowing their circumstances. Attribution research suggests that people account for the effects of advantage by negatively adjusting their evaluations and for the effects of disadvantage by positively adjusting them. We theorize that people adjust their evaluations based on implicit theories of dis/advantage and that they hold one theory of disadvantage (“headwinds”), but two of advantage (“tailwinds” and “bicycle”). The tailwinds and bicycle theories differ in whether advantage is seen as a sufficient cause of performance or not. Consistent with our theorizing, we find that evaluations of college applicants are asymmetric: on average, people adjust their evaluations positively for disadvantage more than they adjust negatively for advantage. This pattern stems from most people adjusting positively for disadvantage, but for advantage, some people adjusting negatively and others not adjusting at all. Through simulations, we show that asymmetric adjustments for dis/advantage lead to an admitted class that is less socioeconomically diverse than if adjustments were symmetric. Our findings suggest an additional explanation for why universities may struggle to diversify, despite having the stated intention and information available to do so.
Merit attributions in context: How revealing opportunity constraints improves evaluations of lower socioeconomic status applicants
Available upon request
Merit-based selection requires evaluators to infer unobservable qualities such as motivation and potential from observable achievements. But identical achievements arise under unequal opportunity structures, and the constraints that shaped an applicant’s record typically remain invisible at the moment of evaluation. We argue that this invisibility creates a merit attributional blind spot: evaluators draw inferences from accomplishments as if they were produced under comparable conditions, systematically underestimating the motivation and potential of lower socioeconomic status (SES) applicants whose records were earned under constraint. Two pilot studies document the resulting dilemma from the applicant side. Undergraduates split nearly evenly on whether a lower-SES applicant should disclose his background in a cover letter, and analyses of online discourse show that students who moved upward most dramatically in institutional rank were the most likely to omit their undergraduate institution from their bios — the applicants with the most to gain from contextualizing their records were the least likely to do so. Across six experiments, we show that revealing achievement under opportunity constraints — disclosure that connects structural barriers to the applicant’s active pursuit of goals despite them — shifts evaluators’ merit attributions and improves evaluations of lower-SES applicants. Merely revealing socioeconomic background is insufficient; evaluators must see the causal link between constraint and accomplishment to recognize hidden merit. The findings identify a self-presentation strategy that lets lower-SES applicants make hidden merit visible without inviting deficit-based interpretation.
Drawing inferences from missing information: How non-disclosure policies reproduce inequality in selection processes (theoretical paper)
Available upon request
Organizations seeking to reduce inequality in selection have increasingly adopted non-disclosure policies—the requirement or option for applicants to omit select information, particularly information tied to structural disadvantages. However, some of these policies, such as test-optional evaluation, salary history bans, and ban-the-box, have yielded null or counterproductive effects for marginalized groups. We propose a model that explains why non-disclosure policies often fail to reduce inequalities in selection. Non-disclosure policies lead organizations and applicants to think strategically about each other and to draw inferences based on incomplete information, leading to more negative inferences about marginalized applicants. When information is withheld, organizations rely more heavily on applicants’ identities and alternative signals that reflect stereotypes, unequal access to resources, and differential guidance. At the same time, marginalized applicants have less certainty about when non-disclosure will benefit them, increasing the likelihood of suboptimal disclosure choices. We introduce the notion of inference disadvantage to capture the inferential processes through which missing information systematically disadvantages marginalized applicants. Inference disadvantage leads organizations to reject qualified marginalized applicants and to select non-marginalized applicants, thereby reproducing inequality.
Published and In Press
The Policy–People Gap: Decision-makers choose policies that favor different applicants than they select when making individual decisions
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This work documents a contemporary organizational problem – a gap between selection policies and individual selection decisions – and suggests one intervention to address it. In college admissions and workplace hiring contexts, we find that decision makers are more likely to favor disadvantaged applicants over applicants with objectively higher achievements when choosing between selection policies than choosing between individual applicants. We document this policy-people gap among admissions officers, working professionals, and lay people, using both within-subject and between-subject designs, and across a range of stimuli. We find that the gap is driven in part by shifting standards of fairness across the two types of decisions. When choosing between individuals, compared to choosing between policies, decision makers are more likely to prioritize what is fair to individuals (a microjustice standard of fairness) over what is fair in the aggregate (a macrojustice standard of fairness). As a result, an intervention that has decision makers prioritize the same standard of fairness across the decisions mitigates the policy-people gap. This research helps us understand why decision makers’ choices so frequently violate espoused organizational policies and suggests one way to increase the representation of disadvantaged groups in organizations.
Too reluctant to reach out: Receiving social support is more positive than expressers expect
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Receiving social support is critical for wellbeing, but concerns about a recipient’s reaction could make people reluctant to express it. Our studies indicate that people’s expectations about how their support will be received predict their likelihood of expressing it (Study 1, N = 100 online adults), but these expectations are systematically miscalibrated. Participants who sent messages of support to others they knew (Study 2, N = 120 students), or who expressed support to a new acquaintance in person (Study 3, N = 50 adult pairs), consistently underestimated how positively their recipients would respond. A systematic perspective gap between expressers and recipients may explain miscalibrated expectations, such that expressers focus on how competent their support seems while recipients focus on the warmth it conveys (Study 4, N = 300 adults). Miscalibrated concerns about how to express support most competently may make people overly reluctant to reach out to someone in need.
“I’m just being honest.” When and why honesty enables help versus harm
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Although honesty is typically conceptualized as a virtue, it often conflicts with other equally important moral values, such as avoiding interpersonal harm. In the present research, we explore when and why honesty enables helpful versus harmful behavior. Across 5 incentive-compatible experiments in the context of advice-giving and economic games, we document four central results. First, honesty enables selfish harm: people are more likely to engage in and justify selfish behavior when selfishness is associated with honesty than when it is not. Second, people are selectively honest: people are more likely to be honest when honesty is associated with selfishness than when honesty is associated with altruism. Third, these effects are more consistent with genuine, rather than motivated, preferences for honesty. Fourth, even when individuals have no selfish incentive to be honest, honesty can lead to interpersonal harm because people avoid information about how their honest behavior affects others. This research unearths new insights on the mechanisms underlying moral choice, and consequently, the contexts in which moral principles are a force of good versus a force of evil.
Everyday dilemmas: New directions on the judgment and resolution of benevolence-integrity dilemmas
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Many everyday dilemmas reflect a conflict between two moral motivations: the desire to adhere to universal principles (integrity) and the desire to improve the welfare of specific individuals in need (benevolence). In this article, we bridge research on moral judgment and trust to introduce a framework that establishes three central distinctions between benevolence and integrity: (1) the degree to which they rely on impartiality, (2) the degree to which they are tied to emotion versus reason, and (3) the degree to which they can be evaluated in isolation. We use this framework to explain existing findings and generate novel predictions about the resolution and judgment of benevolence–integrity dilemmas. Though ethical dilemmas have long been a focus of moral psychology research, recent research has relied on dramatic dilemmas that involve conflicts of utilitarianism and deontology and has failed to represent the ordinary, yet psychologically taxing dilemmas that we frequently face in everyday life. The present article fills this gap, thereby deepening our understanding of moral judgment and decision making and providing practical insights on how decision makers resolve moral conflict.
In Progress
People prefer to address inequalities by reducing disadvantage over advantage
Which college admissions procedures are fair, according to whom, and why?
Is inequality that develops cumulatively seen as more or less fair?
Do people factor candidates’ unequal access to retry opportunities when evaluating them?
Does evaluators’ past dis/advantages make them more or less likely to consider candidates’ circumstances when evaluating them?
Invited chapter on inequality for the Handbook of Judgment and Decision-Making
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