“Don't Stigmatize”: The Ironic Effects of Equal Opportunity Guidelines in Interviews

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to examine how staffing policies (identity-conscious or identity-blind) and interview structure might lead to stigmatizing behavior, particularly subtle behavior that is not illegal. In a 2 (staffing policy: identity-conscious or identity-blind) × 2 (interview structure: structured or unstructured) factorial design, 87 participants interviewed a Black interviewee for an ostensible study on employment interviews and were led to believe they would interview a second Black interviewee. The results showed that participants guided by the identity-blind policy and using an unstructured interview format chose the largest social distance from Black interviewees in the subsequent interview.

Notes

¹As a first attempt to investigate these phenomena, we used only Black men (rather than women too) so as to reduce the design and not confound race and gender effects.

²One participant asked unanticipated questions in which the confederate could not follow his script and was subsequently not included in the analyses.

³We ran a 2 (staffing policy: identity-conscious or identity-blind) × 2 (interview structure: structured or unstructured) analysis of covariance on the social distance measure, with participant gender as the covariate. Adding gender as a covariate changes the results by reducing the significance of the interaction; F(1, 82) = 3.23, p = .08. Although the main effect of gender was not significant, F(1, 82) = 3.58, p = .06, consistent with past research using the social distance measure (see Bos et al., 2007), the means were in the expected direction in that men sat further away from the target (M = 43.88, SD = 5.13) than did women (M = 41.85, SD = 4.74).