Page 321 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

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of information that is provided to them by the experimenter. Participants
perform the task as isolated individuals with no opportunity to interact
with others in the session. Finally, subjects are not emotionally involved
and can assume a detached role in judging the target person. The passive-
observer procedures used in research are ideal for exploring information
processing, but they do not allow exploration of the complex mix of cogni­
tive, affective, behavioral, and social factors that account for attractiveness
bias in organizations. The first step in improving research on this topic is to
develop more comprehensive models to guide these efforts and to conduct
research involving actually interaction of the perceiver and the target of
perception.
HOW IMPORTANT IS THE BIAS AGAINST
UNATTRACTIVE PERSONS?

The consistency with which an attractiveness bias is found is impressive,
but doubts have been raised as to the importance of the effect. One argu­
ment is that the attractiveness bias is trivial because it typically accounts
for a smaller amount of variance than grades, past performance, and other
2
"objective" qualifications. When effect sizes are measured with r , eta, and
omega, the amount of variance attributable to attractiveness is often only
between 1 and 5%. The reliance on effect size measures as an indicator
of importance seems misguided, however, and ignores the fact that small
statistical effects can still have important practical consequences (Abel­
son, 1982; Rosenthal, 1990). For instance, Rosenthal (1990) observed that
only 5.4% of the variance was accounted for in research showing the in­
hibiting effects of AZT on AIDS, only 3.6% in research on the effects of
cyclosporine on rejection of organ transplants, and only .11% in research
showing the relationship of aspirin to heart failure. Martell, Lane, and
Willis (1992) recently found in a computer simulation that rating biases
against women 4% or smaller could result in marked violations of the
4/5ths rule of the EEOC and skewed sex composition at the higher lev­
els of the organization. More research is needed on the issue, but it seems
clear on the basis of existing research that small effect sizes can translate
into major consequences. This seems particularly true when many people
are competing for relatively few positions or scarce resources and when
the biases have an opportunity to accumulate as the result of repeated
judgments.
A second argument against taking attractiveness effects seriously is
that unlike biases based on race, sex, age, and disability, most discrim­
ination against unattractive individuals is legal. Although one could