Contextual Influences on Individual Targets' Perceived Contributions to Group Diversity

Many organizations want to achieve diversity, yet who "counts" as contributing to diversity is malleable. Across four experiments, we explore how contextual influences shape perceptions of diversity, including what happens when information at different contextual levels conflicts. In Study 1 (N = 160) and Study 2 (N = 69, preregistered), we find that when participants believe White women, White men, and Black men to be overrepresented in a profession at the national level, individuals with those identities are rated as contributing less to the diversity of a group of workers within that profession. In Study 3 (N = 164), participants were asked to make diversity judgments within the same profession (American elementary school teachers), but the composition of the target group under evaluation was either White female-dominated (aligned with the profession) or White male-dominated (diverged from the profession). Presenting the group as White male-dominated (compared to White female-dominated) increased perceptions of White women's contributions to diversity and decreased perceptions of White men's, and men of color's, contributions to diversity. In Study 4 (N = 216, preregistered), we attempted to call participants' attention to representation at a single level only (i.e., national vs. target group), when representation information conflicted across levels. However, perceived contributions to diversity did not shift based on experimental conditions. It appears that Americans' judgments of who increases a group's diversity can be affected by representation at multiple levels, although it may be difficult for perceivers to prioritize one contextual level only when such information conflicts.