Lookism is everywhere, and mostly undetected

…some types of discrimination may be less apparent than others. Across seven studies (N=3,486, five preregistered), we find that attractiveness discrimination often goes undetected compared to more prototypical types of discrimination (i.e., gender and race discrimination). This blind spot does not emerge because people perceive attractiveness discrimination to be unproblematic or desirable. Rather, our findings suggest that people’s ability to detect discrimination is bounded. People only focus on a few salient dimensions, such as gender and race, when scrutinizing decision outcomes (e.g., hiring or sentencing decisions) for bias. Consistent with this account, two interventions that increased the salience of attractiveness increased the detection of attractiveness discrimination, but also decreased the detection of gender and race discrimination.

That is from a new paper by Bastian Jaeger, Gabriele Paolacci, and Johannes Boegershausen.  Via someone, I forget whom to thank, but recall they were good-looking!

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