This work documents a contemporary organizational problem—a gap between selection policies and individual selection decisions—and suggests one intervention to address it. In college admissions and workplace hiring contexts, we find that...
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This work documents a contemporary organizational problem—a gap between selection policies and individual selection decisions—and suggests one intervention to address it. In college admissions and workplace hiring contexts, we find that decision-makers are more likely to favor disadvantaged applicants over applicants with objectively higher achievements when choosing between selection policies than choosing between individual applicants. We document this policy–people gap among admissions officers, working professionals, and lay people using both within-subject and between-subject designs and across a range of stimuli. We find that the gap is driven in part by shifting standards of fairness across the two types of decisions. When choosing between individuals, compared to choosing between policies, decision-makers are more likely to prioritize what is fair to individuals (a microjustice standard of fairness) over what is fair in the aggregate (a macrojustice standard of fairness). As a result, an intervention that has decisionmakers prioritize the same standard of fairness across the decisions mitigates the policy–people gap. This research helps us understand why decision-makers’ choices so frequently violate espoused organizational policies and suggests one way to increase the representation of disadvantaged groups in organizations. The supplementary materials linked at the end include additional analyses for the studies reported here as well as additional studies.
