Ethan O'Leary

I propose and test a novel mechanism through which discrimination persists: the misperception of statistical discrimination as taste-based discrimination. I first derive a theoretical model of self-confirming discrimination which arises in the job-application setting to demonstrate this mechanism. Correctly attributing the source of discrimination leads to multiple equilibria such that arriving at inequality represents a coordination error. However, misattributing discrimination to taste-based origins leads only to a discriminatory equilibrium and reduces the perceived return to deviating from discrimination-inducing application strategies. In a pre-registered laboratory experiment, I find that subjects who experience discrimination from an ambiguous origin overestimate the probability that this inequality is caused by taste-based discriminators. This misattribution is associated with a higher probability that application strategies sustain statistical discrimination: a 1 percentage point increase in believed probability that discrimination is taste-based corresponds to a 0.35 (0.24) percentage point decrease (increase) in the probability that a subject in the discriminated (favoured) group applies to a job, perpetuating statistical discrimination. Moreover, the more likely subjects perceive the employer to be a taste-based discriminator, the more unfair they perceive the labour market and the lower their demand for a temporary affirmative action policy aimed at re-coordinating toward a less discriminatory outcome. This demonstrates that the misattribution of the source of discrimination can both directly and indirectly contribute to sustained discrimination and inequality.

Trust, the belief in another individual or organisation's intent to act in good faith, is a cornerstone of social prosperity. However, cultural norms significantly influence trust levels within and between groups, often leading to discriminatory behaviours that undermine cooperation. This paper investigates the impact of culture on trust using a novel experimental approach that isolates trust from confounding factors such as risk preferences and distributional concerns. The setting of the experiment is England, a culturally and economically divided nation. Focusing on self-identified Southerners and Northerners, I find evidence of a cultural trust gap. Specifically, while Southerners exhibit equal trust towards both groups, Northerners trust Southerners significantly less than their own group. By decomposing trust into its conditional and unconditional components, I show that this disparity is driven by unconditional trust: Northerners perceive Southerners as more selfish than their own culture.

We study to what extent including evaluator subjectivity in tournament decisions affects the documented gender gap in competition. We conduct a large-scale, pre-registered online experiment (n=7310) in which workers choose between a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive payment scheme whose payout depends on being selected by an incentivised human evaluator. By randomly varying whether the evaluator can observe the worker's gender across a male-stereotyped and a non-stereotyped task, we exogenously induce the scope for anticipated discrimination. In the male-stereotyped task, gender revelation breaks the link between women's objective performance beliefs and their beliefs about being selected: conditional on the subjective probability of having the best signal, moderately confident women report significantly lower selection expectations when their gender is observable. This distortion reduces female entry, especially among non-risk-averse participants, who had dominated the competitor pool under concealed gender. Revelation also disproportionately affects low-ability women, destabilising the usual negative ability-competition relationship among females. We validate that this effect is driven by the anticipation of gender discrimination and not by a preference for opting out of settings in which gender is made salient: in a non-stereotyped task we find no change in beliefs nor in competition behaviour when their gender is revealed to the evaluator. Our findings suggest that the extent to which the gender competition gap distorts female labour supply may be underestimated in the face of the potential for evaluator bias, even before it is enacted.