Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status

Erika L. Kirgios; Edward H. Chang; Katherine L. Milkman

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status

by Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman

Abstract

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.

Keywords: homophily; group selection; Diversity; Gender; Race; Competition;

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Kirgios, Erika L., Edward H. Chang, and Katherine L. Milkman. "Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 161 (November 2020): 20–33.

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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Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status

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