A choice architecture intervention to increase diversity: Diverse defaults can counteract hiring discrimination

Most interventions aimed at reducing hiring discrimination focus on eliminating people's biases through diversity training, yet such approaches have achieved limited success. Drawing on social information processing theory, we propose a novel choice architecture intervention, diverse defaults, which involves preselecting a demographically diverse set of candidates. We theorize that diverse defaults function as social information, signaling organizational expectations for diversity in the hiring context. Four experiments reported in the main text and six in the supplement found that decision makers chose more women and ethnic minority candidates when a diverse set of candidates was preselected by default than when no candidates were preselected. A mini meta-analysis across all studies showed that this effect held even when decision makers did not retain the default options. That is, even if decision makers chose a different set of options than those preselected, they still chose more diverse candidates than in the control condition, indicating that the diverse default effect operates through perceptions of normative expectations rather than simple inertia (i.e., simply choosing the default options without making any adjustments). Mediation analyses confirmed that diverse defaults increased hiring diversity through perceived organizational diversity expectation. The effect of perceived organizational diversity expectation on hiring diversity was stronger among decision makers with stronger stereotypes, indicating that these perceptions are particularly influential when they are inconsistent with decision makers' preexisting biases. Overall, this research identifies a choice architecture intervention that can promote diversity in hiring without explicitly mentioning diversity, discrimination, gender, race, or related concepts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).