Covert Market Choice Experiment Framing

In Simple Words

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.

Research question

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.

Participants

3,397 non-transgender individuals in urban Chennai, India.

Study Design

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.

Results

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.

Takeaway

Frame prejudice measurement studies as routine commercial decision-making tasks with tangible economic stakes to observe authentic behavioral choices.

Read alongside the research

Plain-English glossary

Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.

Median

The middle number after arranging the values from smallest to largest. If there are two middle numbers, use their average.

ExampleFor the values 2, 4 and 12, the middle value is 4. The median is 4.

NIST · Measures of location ↗Read more about median →

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