Diversity Thresholds: How Social Norms, Visibility, and Scrutiny Relate to Group Composition

Edward H. Chang; Katherine L. Milkman; Dolly  Chugh; Modupe  Akinola

Article | Academy of Management Journal

Diversity Thresholds: How Social Norms, Visibility, and Scrutiny Relate to Group Composition

by Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman, Dolly Chugh and Modupe Akinola

Abstract

Across a field study and four experiments, we examine how social norms and scrutiny affect decisions about adding members of underrepresented populations (e.g., women, racial minorities) to groups. When groups are scrutinized, we theorize that decision makers strive to match the diversity observed in peer groups due to impression management concerns, thereby conforming to the descriptive social norm. We examine this first in the context of U.S. corporate boards, where firms face pressure to increase gender diversity. Analyses of S&P 1500 boards reveal that significantly more boards include exactly two women (the descriptive social norm) than would be expected by chance. This overrepresentation of two-women boards—a phenomenon we call “twokenism”—is more pronounced among more visible companies, consistent with our theorizing around impression management and scrutiny. Experimental data corroborate these findings and provide support for our theoretical mechanism: decision makers are discontinuously less likely to add a woman to a board once it includes two women (the social norm), and decision makers’ likelihood of adding a woman or minority to a group is influenced by the descriptive social norms and scrutiny faced. Together, these findings provide a new perspective on the persistent underrepresentation of women and minorities in organizations.

Keywords: Social Norms; impression management; Groups and Teams; Governing and Advisory Boards; Diversity; Gender; Decision Making;

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Chang, Edward H., Katherine L. Milkman, Dolly Chugh, and Modupe Akinola. "Diversity Thresholds: How Social Norms, Visibility, and Scrutiny Relate to Group Composition." Academy of Management Journal 62, no. 1 (February 2019): 144–171.

Past research demonstrates that people prefer to affiliate with others who resemble them demographically. However, we posit that when competing for scarce opportunities, strategic considerations moderate the strength of this tendency toward homophily. Across six experiments, we find that anticipated competition weakens people’s desire to join groups that include similar others. When expecting to compete against fellow group members, women are more willing to join all-male groups and Black participants are more willing to join all-White groups than in the absence of competition. We show that this effect is mediated by the belief that being distinct will lead your performance to stand out. Our findings offer a new perspective to enrich past research on homophily, shedding light on the instances when minorities are more likely to join groups in which they will be underrepresented.

Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives

Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman and Judd B. Kessler

Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are often effective at inducing good behavior, they’ve been shown to have self-image costs: Those who receive incentives view their actions less positively due to the perceived incompatibility between financial incentives and intrinsic motives. We test an intervention that allows organizations and individuals to resolve this tension: We use financial rewards to kick-start good behavior and then offer individuals the opportunity to give up some or all of their earned financial rewards in order to boost their self-image. Two preregistered studies—an incentivized online experiment (n = 763) on prosocial behavior and a large field experiment (n = 17,968) on exercise—provide evidence that emphasizing the intrinsic rewards of a past action leads individuals to forgo or donate earned financial rewards. Our intervention allows individuals to retroactively signal that they acted for the right reason, which we call “motivation laundering.” We discuss the implications of motivation laundering for the design of incentive systems and behavioral change.

Keywords: incentives; motivation laundering; self-signaling; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Perception;

Citation:

Kirgios, Erika L., Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman, and Judd B. Kessler. "Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 29 (July 21, 2020): 16891–16897. View Details

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We highlight a feature of personnel selection decisions that can influence the gender diversity of groups and teams. Specifically, we show that people are less likely to choose candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making personnel selections in isolation (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting a single group member) than when making collections of choices (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting multiple group members). We call this the isolated choice effect. Across six preregistered experiments (n = 3,509), we demonstrate that the isolated choice effect has important consequences for group diversity. When making sets of hiring and selection decisions (as opposed to making a single hire), people construct more gender-diverse groups. Mediation and moderation studies suggest that people do not attend as much to diversity when making isolated selection choices, which drives this effect.

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Diversity Thresholds: How Social Norms, Visibility, and Scrutiny Relate to Group Composition

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