Covert Market Choice Experiment Framing
RCTReview
Directly measuring discrimination in laboratory settings often produces Hawthorne effects or experimenter demand bias, as participants alter choices when aware that their prejudice is being evaluated.
Picture this
If you ask someone directly if they are biased, they will give the answer that makes them look good. But if you ask them to manage a grocery delivery service where every choice carries real consequences for their order, their underlying biases guide their actions naturally without them realizing they are participating in a discrimination study.
What the evidence says
Covert framing successfully measured baseline discrimination where control group participants sacrificed goods worth nearly twice the median daily per capita food expenditure to avoid selecting transgender workers, while eliminating experimenter demand bias.
- Who was studied
- 3,397 non-transgender individuals in urban Chennai, India.
- How
- Randomized trial framed covertly as market research for a grocery delivery service, where participants completed 10 private binary hiring choices between cisgender and transgender workers with real commodity trade-offs.
What to do
Frame prejudice measurement studies as routine commercial decision-making tasks with tangible economic stakes to observe authentic behavioral choices.
From the source
"The experiment was framed as market research for a grocery delivery service to measure real hiring decisions while minimizing the risk that participants would guess the study's true purpose."
Effects_of_Group_Discussion_on_Hiring_Decisions_Involving_Transgender.pdf