No Shelter for Singles: The Perceived Legitimacy of Marital Status Discrimination

Providing the first empirical evidence of discrimination against singles, participants in multiple experiments favored married couples over various types of singles and failed to recognize such differential treatment as discrimination. In four experiments, undergraduates and rental agents read descriptions of multiple applicants for a rental property and chose one. The applicant pool, varying across experiments, included a married couple and different types of singles. Although the applicants were similar on substantive dimensions, participants consistently chose the married couple over the singles and explicitly stated that the applicants' marital status influenced their choice. In Experiment 5, participants read examples of housing discrimination against singles and other more recognized stigmatized groups. Participants rated discrimination against singles as more legitimate than discrimination against virtually all of the other groups

She's single, so what? How are singles perceived compared with people who are married?

'In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten haben sich klassische Beziehungsmuster geändert. Neben der traditionellen Ehe finden sich heute nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaften, Paare, die getrennte Haushalte führen (LATs) und gleichgeschlechtliche Paare. Daneben wurden Singles zu einer viel diskutierten Gruppe. In Anbetracht der Vielzahl an Lebensformen könnte man annehmen, dass negativ geprägte Stereotype gegenüber Singles zurückgegangen sind. Die Studie zeigt allerdings, dass noch immer verheiratete Personen positiver beurteilt werden als Singles. Beispielsweise werden Singles als einsamer, weniger einfühlsam und weniger fürsorglich eingeschätzt. Es zeigt sich aber auch eine tendenzielle Aufweichung des negativen Stereotyps: (jungen) Singles werden einige positive Eigenschaften zugeschrieben. Hierbei moderieren Merkmale der bewertenden Person die Einschätzung. Vor allem jüngere Frauen und ältere Singles haben ein relativ positives Bild von Singles und beurteilen sie im Vergleich zu verheirateten Personen als geselliger und weltgewandter.' (Autorenreferat)'Over the past few decades, relationship patterns have become more diverse. Besides classical marriage we find cohabitation, romantic partners living apart, and same-sex couples. Furthermore, single people have become an important and intensely discussed segment of society. Due to the increasing plurality of living arrangements, one might assume that stereotypes about singles have changed over the years. The study shows that married people are generally still seen more positively than singles. Singles were seen as more lonely, less warm and caring than married people. However, some positive features are ascribed to singles, too. Importantly, characteristics of the perceiver moderate his or her perceptions. Some groups rated single people as more sophisticated and sociable than married people.' (author's abstract

Deception and Self-Deception

Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others of their superior performance. The privately elicited beliefs of informed subjects are significantly more confident than the beliefs of subjects in the control condition. By generating exogenous variation in confidence with a noisy performance signal, we are also able to show that higher confidence indeed makes subjects more persuasive in the subsequent face-to-face interactions