Discover more from Overcoming Bias
I’ve long wondered: why do students pay such a premium to go to a school with impressive professors, even when those professors largely ignore them? Yesterdays’ Post gives a clue:
Social psychologist Michelle Hebl … had volunteers evaluate a mock job applicant. Some volunteers saw the applicant sitting in a waiting room next to an overweight person, while others saw the applicant in the waiting room sitting next to a person of average weight. … Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people. … Men and women seen in the company of beautiful partners are perceived as being more attractive than when they are seen in plainer company. … Heterosexual men seen in the company of gay men had some of the stigma attached to homosexuality rub off on them.
Guilt By Association
Spin, you assume a manager is even thinking of absenteeism when looking at a fat person. Why is it we find ourselves denying human nature by placing labels like employer on people? Most of what we do comes from misunderstood gut feelings which are bubbles of unlabeled information coming out of a pool of personal history with everything blurred together. If we guessed about something or heard about it at half-attention and the sentiment was never challenged within a certain time, the brain gives it a high confidence and takes it as truth.
I do appreciate the point of the original post, but for me the question of guilt by association was less interesting than the unspoken assumption that any physical assessment of job candidates by an employer is "prejudiced".
The fact that the negative evaluation transferred to people merely sitting next to the overweight candidates strongly suggests that the evaluation is not a rational one.