Ethnicity- and sex-based discrimination and the maintenance of self-esteem.

Jan-Erik Lönnqvist,Heike Hennig-Schmidt,Gari Walkowitz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124622

Abstract

The psychological underpinnings of labor market discrimination were investigated by having participants from Israel, the West Bank and Germany (N = 205) act as employers in a stylized employment task in which they ranked, set wages, and imposed a minimum effort level on applicants. State self-esteem was measured before and after the employment task, in which applicant ethnicity and sex were salient. The applicants were real people and all behavior was monetarily incentivized. Supporting the full self-esteem hypothesis of the social identity approach, low self-esteem in women was associated with assigning higher wages to women than to men, and such behavior was related to the maintenance of self-esteem. The narrower hypothesis that successful intergroup discrimination serves to protect self-esteem received broader support. Across all participants, both ethnicity- and sex-based discrimination of out-groups were associated with the maintenance of self-esteem, with the former showing a stronger association than the latter.

Highlights

The lack of previous research on the self-esteem hypothesis in an employment context could be considered especially surprising as the social identity approach to intergroup relations has, during the last decades, emerged as a meta-theory for work on group processes
In Germany, participants were recruited through the universities of Bonn and Cologne mailing lists to which they had signed up in order to take part in research conducted at the Laboratory of Experimental Economics Research
Regarding Hypothesis (2), we found that women who favored their own sex concerning wages initially had lower levels of self-esteem in comparison to women who favored men Imposed minimum effort 18 level

Summary

Introduction

The employer-applicant relationship may well be one of the most important and well-documented real-world contexts in which intergroup discrimination, especially with regard to ethnicity and sex, is known to be a major problem [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The self-esteem hypothesis of the currently highly influential social identity approach was formulated to explain intergroup discrimination—by establishing positive distinctness for the in-group, in-group members are establishing positive self-esteem for themselves. To the best of our knowledge, there appears to be no previous literature that directly addresses whether the self-esteem hypothesis could help explain discrimination by employers. The lack of previous research on the self-esteem hypothesis in an employment context could be considered especially surprising as the social identity approach to intergroup relations has, during the last decades, emerged as a meta-theory for work on group processes. Core constructs of the theory, such as categorization, status, legitimacy, and identity, appear essential to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0124622 May 15, 2015

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