Collateral Damage: The Relationship Between High-Salience Events and Variation in Racial Discrimination

Andreea Gorbatai (), Peter Younkin () and Gordon Burtch
Additional contact information
Andreea Gorbatai: Department of Entrepreneurship, Vlerick Business School, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Peter Younkin: Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1208

Organization Science, 2023, vol. 34, issue 6, 2250-2271

Abstract: To what extent are individual or organizational biases affected by racially salient events? We propose that acts of discrimination and the individual biases that undergird them are sensitive to high-salience events and will oscillate with the salience of the focal attribute. In short, that the propensity to discriminate reflects both individual and environmental differences, and therefore a given person may become more prone to discriminate in the aftermath of a high-salience event. We test our hypothesis in three online experiments that examine how varying the salience of race affects the evaluation of in-group or out-group founders. We find that respondents evaluate their in-group members more favorably, and out-group members less favorably, when exposed to a high-salience event, which translates into a significant disadvantage for the minority (African American) group. We complement these studies with an assessment of how police shootings affect fundraising outcomes on Kickstarter to confirm the external validity of our findings. Together, these studies indicate that racially salient events depress the quality evaluations and success odds of African American entrepreneurs relative to others. Hence, discrimination levels can be affected by salient yet unrelated events, and such events are consequential for the economic fortunes of individuals belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups.

Keywords: diversity in organizations; organization and management theory; entrepreneurship; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1527 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:34:y:2023:i:6:p:2250-2271

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().