Why Putting On Blinders Can Help Us See More Clearly
Even if your organization doesn’t have a “blinding” policy for hiring and other people evaluations, it’s possible to reap some of the benefits.
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Image courtesy of Brian Stauffer/theispot.com
Would you decide which job candidates to interview based on their names — or which ventures to fund based on entrepreneurs’ gender or physical attractiveness? Few managers would admit doing so, even to themselves. But research shows that decision makers are in fact susceptible to exactly this type of bias. Identical resumes sent in response to job postings are less likely to generate a callback for an interview if the name at the top suggests the candidate is Black.1 And female entrepreneurs face harsher questions from potential investors and are less likely to have their ideas funded than men (particularly attractive men).2
Generally, this body of research demonstrates that the fairness of social evaluations — such as whom to hire, invest in, or promote — can be adversely affected by irrelevant and seemingly innocuous attributes, like name or appearance, because of the biases they evoke. How might these judgments be made more equitably? One way to reduce the potential for bias and increase objectivity is to adopt a decision-making strategy called blinding — that is, limiting the information that can be considered in an evaluation. The logic is straightforward: An evaluator cannot be biased by irrelevant information about a target of evaluation (for instance, a job candidate’s name) if that information is hidden from view. It is for this reason that Justice is typically depicted wearing a blindfold: The blindfold ensures the impartiality of her decision-making.
Over the past several years, we have studied both the benefits of and the barriers to blinding in the context of organizational evaluations like hiring decisions and performance reviews. More specifically, we have explored the factors that might influence whether evaluators will choose on their own to use a strategy of blinding in their evaluations. In the absence of organizationwide blinding policies that strictly limit the information people can incorporate into their decisions — policies that are rare and sometimes hard to implement — these personal preferences are important to understand. We have found that managers and other evaluators in organizations can make fairer and more accurate assessments by proactively blinding themselves to potentially biasing information about a target of evaluation.
References (28)
1. M. Bertrand and S. Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (September 2004): 991-1013; and M. Bertrand and E. Duflo, “Field Experiments on Discrimination,” in “Handbook of Economic Field Experiments,” vol. 1, ed. A. Banerjee and E. Duflo (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2017), 309-393.
2. D. Kanze, L. Huang, M.A. Conley, et al., “We Ask Men to Win and Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding,” Academy of Management Journal 61, no. 2 (April 2018): 586-614; and A.W. Brooks, L. Huang, S.W. Kearney, et al., “Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 12 (March 2014): 4427-4431.