ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews research that implies that employment decisions are routinely biased as a result of normal cognitive processes. The core cognitive process that links gender and race to workplace outcomes is categorization. A critical concomitant of categorization is the generalization of similarity and difference. Categorization leads to a second automatic cognitive process with potentially discriminatory effects: stereotyping. Stereotyping is an inferential process in which we attribute traits that we habitually associate with a group to individuals who belong to that group. Automatic categorization, ingroup preference, and stereotyping are cognitively efficient for individuals. The automaticity of ingroup preference probably plays an important role in producing disparate employment outcomes for different race or sex groups. One way to minimize its discriminatory effects is to dissociate ingroup membership from ascribed statuses. Employment decisions that are based on unstructured observations are especially vulnerable to cognitive biases.
