Labor Economics Commons^™

Effects Of Relative Position On Success In Dancing Competitions - Lessons For Discrimination In Recruitment Processes, Jan P. Ringling

Undergraduate Economic Review

This article argues that there exists a further reason for discrimination beside taste and statistics, based on cognitive bias in the human thought process. The order in which one appears to recruiters in the hiring process also influences the chances of being hired in a non-linear way. When the characteristics of particular groups of people correlate with their order in which they appear in the hiring process, they stand a higher or lower chance of being hired. Preliminary evidence based on the results of the United Kingdom’s largest student dancing competition supports this hypothesis, but finds only a …