Mood and Hiring Choice: An Online Labor Market Experiment

We explore whether there is a link between mood and hiring decisions. This research examines how positive mood affects the discrimination faced by homosexual and female job candidates compared to heterosexual and male ones. We randomly assign respondents to one of two mood-inducing videos (positive and neutral), and we allow subjects to make a series of hiring choices prior and immediately after watching the mood-inducing video. Our experiment being conducted in the online labor platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, allows us to track the complete hiring process and monitor employers' behavior within and without our treatment context. Constructing pairs of curriculum vitae, distinguished only by the sexual orientation or the gender of the applicants in each case, leads to the observation that women and gay men faced a significantly lower chance of getting hired. We also find that female employers proposed higher levels of discrimination only in the case of female applicants. Our positive mood manipulation leads to a decrease of discrimination levels. Thus, there is substantial experimental evidence to suggest that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender also exists in online labor markets. An additional experiment with negative mood manipulation, also, gives evidence for the opposite direction of the effects, contributing to a broader picture of the relationship between mood and discrimination behavior. Contributions to the literature on hiring discrimination, mood research and the online economy are discussed.