Faulty reasoning signals

• Framing Effect - 12.7%
• False Dilemma - 9.5%
• Confirmation Bias - 6.6%

Article text

Political beliefs affect people's beliefs about the relationship between diversity and merit in hiring.

Political liberals believe that diversity efforts enhance the opportunity to hire the best person.

Political conservatives believe that diversity efforts hamper the likelihood of hiring the best person.

These results are focused on individuals in the United States.

Source: Image generated with ChatGPT July 8, 2026

As I am writing this in 2026 in the United States, there has been a backlash against decades of work on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. The idea behind DEI efforts is that a variety of structural factors within American society have made it more difficult for qualified candidates from particular demographic groups to get entry into elite jobs and positions. DEI efforts take a number of forms, including efforts to increase the number of people from a variety of groups who apply for jobs, to requirements that people from particular groups be included in the set of individuals interviewed for positions, to quotas that require a minimum number of individuals from particular groups be hired or admitted.

The reaction against such initiatives appears rooted in a belief that increasing the diversity of a workforce or student body decreases its quality. That is, at least some people believe that the goal of enabling the most qualified individuals to get admitted or hired is subverted by DEI efforts. A 2026 paper by Evan Apfelbaum, Eileen Suh, and Yue Wu in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explored the pervasiveness of this belief in the United States.

These studies were interested in people’s perception of whether a search would lead to hiring the best person for the job based on a description of the search process. When a search process was described as involving one or more interventions to increase diversity, all of the DEI techniques were explicitly described as ways to increase the size of the applicant pool (for example, by recruiting from additional locations such as universities with a large population of students from under-represented groups). The aim was to ensure that the DEI techniques in the study did not involve anything that might seem to be overtly prioritizing race, gender , and ethnicity over applicant quality.

These studies made an effort to recruit participants with a variety of different political beliefs. The data were analyzed taking the political beliefs of the participant into account.

Across studies, a straightforward pattern of results emerged. People with liberal political beliefs felt that a search that engages techniques to increase the diversity of the applicant pool (compared to a search that did not use these techniques) was equally likely (and sometimes slightly more likely) to yield the best candidate. In contrast, people with conservative political beliefs felt that engaging techniques to increase the diversity of the applicant pool decreased the likelihood of netting the best candidate compared to searches that did not use these techniques. This pattern was mirrored by perceptions of fairness where engaging DEI techniques to increase the size of the applicant pool decreased the sense of fairness of the search for those with conservative political beliefs, but not those with liberal political beliefs.

What explains this difference between those with liberal and conservative beliefs? In some studies in this paper, participants also filled out a scale about their beliefs about whether differences in outcomes for particular groups reflect a system that is biased against those individuals or whether they reflect aspects of the members of those groups (like a lack of drive or initiative). The more that someone believes that social systems are biased against people from underrepresented groups, the less likely they are to think that DEI efforts hamper the search for the best candidate. In the United States, political liberals are more likely than political conservatives to believe that the system is biased against individuals from particular racial and ethnic groups.

So, is it possible to develop search processes that promote inclusion of under-represented groups that do not lead to a perception that the search is biased? A final set of studies described searches that did (or did not) increase the diversity of the applicant pool, but then explicitly mentioned removing any information about group membership in the evaluation process. When it was clear that information about race, gender, and ethnicity was not available during the selection process, the presence of DEI techniques to increase the size of the applicant pool did not influence people’s beliefs that the search would yield the best candidate both for participants with liberal and conservative beliefs.

What I find most interesting about these studies is that they suggest that people internalize beliefs related to their political ideology that leads to automatically activated associations among concepts (such as the relationship between diversity and merit). Part of the reason that I don’t think this association involves an explicit reasoning process is that the DEI techniques described in these studies were all focused on increasing the size of the applicant pool, yet they influenced people’s beliefs about whether the search would yield the best candidate. Indeed, it required calling attention to an approach that would eliminate the use of race, gender, and ethnicity in evaluation to remove the assumption that DEI would affect the fairness of the search.

Apfelbaum, E. P., Suh, E. Y., & Wu, Y. (2026). Belief in a diversity–meritocracy trade-off. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 131 (1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000482

Art Markman, Ph.D. , is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think.

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