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Race, Criminal Records, and Discrimination Against Job Seekers: Examining Attitudinal Mechanisms

Regardless of why it happens, racial discrimination is damaging and unacceptable. Efforts to reduce discrimination, however, are most successful when we understand the mechanisms that give rise to it. Building on the observation that employers are members of the public, we examine two attitudinal mechanisms that may foster discriminatory employment practices in the context of criminal background checks: stereotypes and threat-based animus. First, we estimate public perceptions of arrest prevalence using two nationwide surveys. Next, we experimentally test the effects of two racially threatening primes—Census projections about a coming majority-minority America, and information about the prison population’s racial composition—on attitudes toward hiring job applicants with criminal records. Consistent with statistical discrimination theory, respondents identify black males as having the highest arrest prevalence. Respondents are less accurate, however, when it comes to gender differences: they underestimate arrest prevalence for black, Hispanic, and white males, and tend to overestimate it for females. On the other hand, our experiments provide little evidence of an effect of threat-based animus: racially threatening primes that are influential in other contexts do not significantly impact attitudes about hiring applicants with criminal records.