Anna Shcherbiak

Promotions account for a sizeable share of the gender gap in wage growth, significantly disadvantaging women. This study suggests that part of the answer may be biased promotability evaluation criteria. We use simple computer animations to enact several precise variations of employee performance. Subjects are recruited to watch an animation and determine whether the character deserves to be promoted, based on common promotability criteria (e.g., task performance, political skill, growth potential, cultural fit). Our research not only aims to measure the extent to which gender stereotypes affect performance evaluations but also highlights which criteria are most susceptible to them.

Voters' support for policies that contradict their economic self-interest remains a persistent puzzle in the social sciences. While recent research highlights how social identity shapes political attitudes, most studies focus on responses to polarizing issues such as climate change or immigration. In the context of redistribution, emerging evidence suggests that identity-protective cognition may exacerbate economic inequality when it benefits the ingroup, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate how identity orientation biases beliefs about the impact of redistributive policy. Participants vote on policies that either enhance their ingroup status or maximize individual earnings, with payoffs externally determined. By manipulating both ingroup status (positive/negative discrimination) and earning potential (high/low), we elicit beliefs about the welfare effects of meritocratic and redistributive policies.

People often surround themselves with like-minded individuals who reinforce their beliefs, forming echo chambers that may give the impression that a belief is widely shared. However, individuals vary in the extent to which they support a belief and how central it is to them — some belief holders will inevitably be more extreme in their views than others, but due to the false consensus effect of the echo chamber, they may not realize how far outside the mainstream their views actually are. Our project tries to unravel how people resolve internal dissonance between maintaining their beliefs and assimilating into a social group. More specifically, we ask: how do people trade off identity (i.e., belonging) vs. epistemic (i.e., accurate beliefs) goals? In an incentivized forced-choice donation game, we vary the centrality of identity and the ideological distance to identify conditions under which individuals would substitute identity to protect beliefs, and vice versa.