Spillover bias in social and nonsocial judgments of diversity and variability

In three experiments, we conceptually replicated and extended the spillover bias in judgments of diversity that was first reported by Daniels et al. (2017, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 139, 92-105). In the first experiment, we showed that judgments of the ethnoracial diversity of groups of people were affected by the gender diversity of those people. In the second experiment, we extended this result to nonsocial stimuli by showing that judgments of the size diversity and size variability of groups of circles were affected by the color diversity of those circles. In the third experiment, we showed that judgments of the ethnoracial diversity of groups of people were affected by the color diversity of a group of circles in the background. These results suggest that diversity spillover bias is an extremely general phenomenon that occurs for both social and nonsocial judgments of diversity and variability. We propose that it occurs because people use the overall perceived diversity in a set of stimuli as a cue to judge diversity on any specific dimension.