A blind spot for attractiveness discrimination: Why some types of discrimination go undetected

Abstract

Discrimination remains a key challenge for social equity. There is widespread agreement that discrimination is unfair and should be punished. A prerequisite for this is that instances of discrimination are detected. Yet, some types of discrimination may be less apparent than others. Across six high-powered studies (N = 3,269, five preregistered) and two supplemental studies with American and Dutch participants, we find that attractiveness discrimination often goes undetected compared to more prototypical types of discrimination (i.e., gender and race discrimination). This was observed for hiring and sentencing decisions, different measures of discrimination perceptions (open-ended descriptions, fairness ratings, explicit attributions to discrimination), and different manifestations of discrimination (favoring vs. disfavoring individuals). This blind spot does not emerge because people perceive attractiveness discrimination to be less problematic. Rather, our findings suggest that people’s ability to detect discrimination is bounded. When scrutinizing decision outcomes (e.g., hiring or sentencing decisions) for bias, people tend to focus on a few salient dimensions, such as gender and race. Consistent with this account, interventions that drew attention to attractiveness discrimination increased its subsequent detection, but also decreased the detection of other types of discrimination