To be or not to be egalitarian, that is the question: Understanding the complexity of ethnic prejudice in the workplace

Abstract

The expression of prejudice has mutated over the last century, and most Western countries now legally support equality. However, for ethnic minorities, work discrimination is one of the most evident challenges they have to face. Three preregistered experiments, with an overall sample of 1,507 participants, analyzed the effect of a job applicant’s ethnicity and other characteristics (e.g., gender, attractiveness), which were manipulated with a CV, as well as possible moderator variables (tolerance and racism), on participants’ judgments about the candidate: stereotypes (competence, sociability, morality, and immorality); emotions (admiration, contempt, compassion, and envy); and active and passive facilitation tendencies at work. The results indicated that tolerance and racism modulated the effect of ethnicity on the dependent variables in an administrative occupation (Studies 1 and 2) and in the hostelry industry (Study 3). A pooled analysis revealed that egalitarian participants (high tolerance or low racism) reported an unexpected positive bias toward a Moroccan candidate compared to a Spanish candidate. Non-egalitarian participants (low tolerance or high racism) showed the expected ingroup bias only for (im)morality: they perceived Moroccan applicants as less moral and more immoral than Spanish candidates. Studies 2 and 3 confirmed that the Moroccan candidate was perceived as less prototypical of his/her category than the Spanish applicant was. We discussed the primacy of (im)morality in social perception as well as the relevance of distinguishing between egalitarian and non-egalitarian people when trying to understand the complexity of new expressions of prejudice and to identify strategies to avoid discrimination in the workplace.