Regardless of why it happens, racial discrimination is damaging and unacceptable. Efforts to reduce discrimination, however, are most successful when we understand the mechanisms that give rise to it. Building on the observation that employers are members of the public, we examine two attitudinal mechanisms that may foster discriminatory employment practices in the context of criminal background checks: stereotypes and threat-based animus. First, we estimate public perceptions of arrest prevalence using two nationwide surveys. Next, we experimentally test the effects of two racially threatening primes—Census projections about a coming majority-minority America, and information about the prison population’s racial composition—on attitudes toward hiring job applicants with criminal records. Consistent with statistical discrimination theory, respondents identify black males as having the highest arrest prevalence. Respondents are less accurate, however, when it comes to gender differences: they underestimate arrest prevalence for black, Hispanic, and white males, and tend to overestimate it for females. On the other hand, our experiments provide little evidence of an effect of threat-based animus: racially threatening primes that are influential in other contexts do not significantly impact attitudes about hiring applicants with criminal records.

不管为什么会发生，种族歧视都是有害的，是不可接受的。然而，当我们了解导致歧视的机制时，减少歧视的努力是最成功的。基于雇主是公众成员的观察，我们研究了两种可能在犯罪背景调查中助长歧视性就业做法的态度机制：刻板印象和基于威胁的敌意。首先，我们使用两项全国性调查来估计公众对逮捕流行率的看法。接下来，我们通过实验测试了两个威胁种族的素数——关于即将到来的少数族裔美国的人口普查预测，以及关于监狱人口种族构成的信息——对雇用有犯罪记录的求职者的态度的影响。与统计歧视理论一致，受访者认为黑人男性被捕率最高。然而，当涉及到性别差异时，受访者不太准确：他们低估了黑人、西班牙裔和白人男性的逮捕率，而往往高估了女性的逮捕率。另一方面，我们的实验几乎没有提供基于威胁的敌意的影响的证据：在其他情况下具有影响力的种族威胁素数不会显着影响雇用有犯罪记录的申请人的态度。