Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T18:52:29.218Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2019

Scott E. Bokemper ,
Peter Descioli  and
Reuben Kline Open the ORCID record for Reuben Kline [Opens in a new window]
Scott E. Bokemper
Affiliation:
Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, 77 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06492, USA, e-mail: [email protected]
Peter Descioli
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Rd., Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA, e-mail: [email protected]
Reuben Kline*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Rd., Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA, e-mail: [email protected]
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulated whether the unequal pay was based on their political party, eye color, or an arbitrary choice between two doors. Consistent with the divisiveness hypothesis, participants judged discriminatory pay to be less fair when it was based on a stable characteristic, political party, or eye color, compared to a transient choice (between doors). We find mixed evidence about how affective polarization exacerbates the unfairness of partisan discrimination. We discuss implications for the procedural justice of wage discrimination.

Keywords

Procedural justiceinequalityfairnessequal paydiscriminationJ71 Labor Discrimination
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , Winter 2019 , pp. 180 - 191
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank John Hibbing, Vittorio Merola, and Alex Shaw for helpful comments. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GPRPZL. The authors declare no financial conflicts of interest with respect to this study.

References

Berinsky, A.J., Margolis, M.F., and Sances, M.W.. 2014. Separating the Shirkers from the Workers? Making Sure Respondents Pay Attention to Self-administered Surveys. American Journal of Political Science 58: 739–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blau, F. D., and Kahn, L. M.. 1992. Race and Gender Pay Differentials. In Research Frontiers in Industrial Relations and Human Resources, eds. Lewin D., Mitchell O. and Sherer P., Madison. WI: Industrial Relations Research Association, 381–416.Google Scholar
Blau, F. D., and Kahn, L. M.. 2000. Gender Differences in Pay. Journal of Economic Perspectives 14: 75–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bokemper, S., DeScioli, P., and Kline, R.. 2019. Replication Data for: Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice. Harvard Dataverse. doi: 10.7910/DVN/GPRPZLCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camerer, C. F. 2003. Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Chwe, M.S.-Y. 2001. Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cronk, L., and Leech, B. L.. 2012. Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawes, C. T., Fowler, J. H., Johnson, J., McElreath, R., and Smirnov, O.. 2007. Egalitarian Motives in Humans. Nature 446: 794–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeScioli, P. and Karpoff, R.. 2015. People’s Judgments about Classic Property Law Cases. Human Nature 26: 184–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeScioli, P. and Kurzban, R.. 2013. A Solution to the Mysteries of Morality. Psychological Bulletin 139: 477–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeScioli, P., Massenkoff, M., Shaw, A., Petersen, M.B., and Kurzban, R.. 2014. Equity or Equality? Moral Judgments Follow the Money. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281: 20142122.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P., and Wilson, B. J.. 2011. The Territorial Foundations of Human Property. Evolution and Human Behavior 32: 297–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickson, E. S., Gordon, S. C., and Huber, G. A.. 2009. Enforcement and Compliance in an Uncertain World: An Experimental Investigation. The Journal of Politics 71: 1357–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickson, E. S., Gordon, S. C., and Huber, G. A.. 2015. Institutional Sources of Legitimate Authority: An Experimental Investigation. American Journal of Political Science 59: 109–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, E., and Schmidt, K. M.. 1999. A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 114: 817–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerber, A. S., Huber, G. A., Doherty, D., and Dowling, C. M.. 2012. Is There a Secret Ballot? Ballot Secrecy Perceptions and Their Implications for Voting Behaviour. British Journal of Political Science 43: 77–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, J. L. 1989. Understandings of Justice: Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Political Tolerance. Law and Society Review 23: 469–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grafen, A. 1987. The Logic of Divisively Asymmetric Contests: Respect for Ownership and the Desperado Effect. Animal Behaviour 35: 462–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, D. P., Palmquist, P., and Schickler, E.. 2004. Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hibbing, J. R. and Theiss-Morse, E.. 2001. Process Preferences and American Politics: What People Want Government To Be. American Political Science Review 95: 145–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, S., Sood, G., and Lelkes, Y.. 2012. Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly 76: 405–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Layman, G. C. and Carsey, T. M.. 2002. Party Polarization and ‘Conflict Extension’ in the American Electorate. American Journal of Political Science 46: 786–802.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leicht, K. T. 2008. Broken Down by Race and Gender? Sociological Explanations of New Sources of Earnings Inequality. Annual Review of Sociology 34: 237–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D. 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lind, E. A. and T. R., Tyler. 1988. The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. New York, NY: Plenum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mason, L. 2015. ‘I Disrespectfully Agree’: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Social and Issue Polarization. American Journal of Political Science 59: 128–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maynard Smith, J. 1982. Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moene, K. O. and Wallerstein, M.. 2001. Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution. American Political Science Review 95: 859–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. 2007. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York, NY: Viking.Google Scholar
Reed, L. I., DeScioli, P., and Pinker, S. A.. 2014. The Commitment Function of Angry Facial Expressions. Psychological Science 25: 1511–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rehm, P., Hacker, J. S., and Schlesinger, M.. 2012. Insecure Alliances: Risk, Inequality, and Support for the Welfare State. American Political Science Review 106: 386–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schelling, T. C. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Shaw, A. 2013. Beyond ‘to Share or Not to Share’ The Impartiality Account of Fairness. Current Directions in Psychological Science 22: 413–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, A., DeScioli, P., and Olson, K. R.. 2012. Fairness versus Favoritism in Children. Evolution and Human Behavior 33: 736–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, A. and Olson, K. R.. 2012. Children Discard a Resource to Avoid Inequity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141: 382–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sindhav, B., Holland, J., Rodie, A. R., Adidam, P. T., and Pol, L. G.. 2006. The Impact of Perceived Fairness on Satisfaction: Are Airport Security Measures Fair? Does it Matter? Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 14: 323–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starmans, C., Sheskin, M., and Bloom, P.. 2017. Why People Prefer Unequal Societies. Nature Human Behaviour 1: 0082.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sweeney, P. D. 1990. Distributive Justice and Pay Satisfaction: A Field Test of an Equity Theory Prediction. Journal of Business and Psychology 4: 329–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sweeney, P. D., McFarlin, D. B., and Inderrieden, E. J.. 1990. Using Relative Deprivation Theory to Explain Satisfaction with Income and Pay Level: A Multistudy Examination. Academy of Management Journal 33: 423–36.Google Scholar
Thomas, K. A., DeScioli, P., Haque, O. S., and Pinker, S.. 2014. The Psychology of Coordination and Common Knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107: 657–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., Kurzban, R., and DeScioli, P.. 2013. Disgust: Evolved Function and Structure. Psychological Review 120: 65–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tyler, T. R. and Blader, S. L.. 2003. Procedural Justice, Social Identity, and Cooperative Behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review 7: 349–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tyler, T. R. and C. J., Wakslak. 2004. Profiling and Police Legitimacy:Procedural Justice, Attributions of Motive, and Acceptance of Police Authority. Criminology 42: 253–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, T. R., Casper, J. D., and Fisher, B.. 1989. Maintaining Allegiance toward Political Authorities: The Role of Prior Attitudes and the Use of Fair Procedures. American Journal of Political Science 33: 629–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Vugt, M. 2006. Evolutionary Origins of Leadership and Followership. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10: 354–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: File

Bokemper et al. supplementary material

Appendix I

Download Bokemper et al. supplementary material(File)
File 176 KB