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Much research focuses on religious bias and in particular the marginalization of Muslims in America. What initially surprised post 9-11 researchers is that participants typically rank atheists lower than Muslims in the areas of private and public trust. Further research is needed to continue to understand the nature and extent of religious-based bias. The present study explores whether a job candidate's religion impacts perception of the candidate's "hireability" and source credibility, including elements of trustworthiness, expertise and attractiveness. Participants were randomly assigned to review an identical version of a resume in which only the implied religion of the candidate was manipulated. One line of the candidate's resume suggested that the candidate was Christian, Muslim, Scientologist, Atheist or no religion was indicated. Participants then rated the candidate using a 3-question Hireability Index (Rudman & Glick, 2001) and the Source-Credibility Scale (SCS: Ohanian, 1990). The SCS contains 3 subscales measuring Attractiveness, Expertise and Trustworthiness. In this study, attractiveness emerged as a variable influenced by the religion of the candidate. Trends in the data also suggest that the candidate's religion may influence the candidate's overall Hireability Index score as well. The results suggest that religion may influence variables related to hireability but seem to more strongly influence personal variables such as ratings of attractiveness when the ratings are made by participants who are young and educated.

This study examined the relationship between levels of sports team identification and sentence leniency. It was hypothesized that sharing the same sports team affiliation with the defendant would create bias in the form of juror leniency, and that highly identified fans would show more bias than lower identified fans. A case description of a hit and run accident, in which the defendant was described as a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, was read by 220 participants. Results showed a significant difference in recommended sentence length and levels of sympathy between the three groups (High Identity, Low Identity, & No Identity). However, contrary to the original hypothesis, participants who were highly identified with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers recommended a significantly longer sentence for the defendant and were less sympathetic than participants who had lower identification to the Buccaneers and those who had no Buccaneer identification. This paper discusses the relation of this finding with the Reverse Attractive Leniency Effect, as well as the Same-Sex Penalty Effect.

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The idea of multi-criteria decision making has been around for quite a while. All judgement tasks are potential points of bias introduction. Each judgement task was assessed to identify common biases introduced through an extensive literature review for each task and bias. In several other studies, the distinction is made between cognitive and motivational biases. Cognitive biases are widely studied and well known with mitigations that have been validated. Motivational biases are judgements influenced by the decision maker’s desire for a specific outcome, also referred to as intentional bias, that are hard to correct and received very little testing and exploration. This study tested the techniques that are identified for reducing motivational bias and tested an instrument to identify characteristics within a decision maker that would increase the likelihood that they would be motivationally biased. The results of this study provide a methodology for assessing the susceptibility to motivational biases of the decision makers and provides a framework for reducing the motivational bias within the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) process using the general steps applicable to all multi-criteria decision analyses. Given that the general steps are used, this methodology is generalizable to any MCDM problem or domain and was found to be reliable and consistent with previous instruments and tools. A summary of the future research to further the explore the methodology and additional techniques for reducing motivational bias is proposed.

Three common methods have been used to assess the existence of rating bias in performance ratings: the total association approach, the differential constructs approach and the direct effects approach. One purpose of this study was to examine how the direct effects approach, and more specifically differential prediction analysis, is more useful than the other two approaches in examining the existence of rating bias. However, the usefulness of differential prediction depends on modeling the full rater race X ratee race interaction. Therefore, the second purpose of this study was to examine the conditions where differential prediction has sufficient power to detect this interaction. This was accomplished using monte carlo simulations. Total sample size, magnitude of rating bias, validity of predictor scores, rater race proportion and ratee race proportion were manipulated to identify which conditions of these parameters provided acceptable power to detect the rater race X ratee race interaction; in the conditions where power levels are acceptable, differential prediction is a useful tool in examining the existence of rating bias. The simulation results suggest that total sample size, magnitude of rating bias and rater race proportion have the most impact on power levels. Furthermore, these three parameters interact to effect power. Implications of these results are discussed. / Master of Science

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According to terror management theory, awareness of death affects diverse aspects of human thought and behavior. Studies have shown that older and younger adults differ in how they respond to reminders of their mortality. The present study investigated one hypothesized explanation for these findings: Age-related differences in the tendency to make correspondent inferences. The correspondence bias was assessed in younger and older samples after death-related, negative, or neutral primes. Younger adults displayed increased correspondent inferences following mortality primes, whereas older adults' inferences were not affected by the reminder of death. As in prior research, age differences were evident in control conditions; however, age differences were eliminated in the death condition. Results support the existence of age-related differences in responses to mortality, with only younger adults displaying increased reliance on simplistic information structuring after a death reminder.

The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is a confrontation naming test which is used to measure naming ability. The primary purpose of this study was to identify whether cultural bias negatively affects South African’s performance on the Boston Naming Test (BNT). More specifically the study aimed to identify the exact items of the BNT on which South Africans perform poorly because of cultural bias. The research identified alternate responses given by respondents in terms of a percentage. The study further aimed to explore whether there was a significant difference in performance when comparing English, Zulu and Sotho respondents in terms of item response. This investigation also intended to discover whether being bilingual would affect South African’s performance on the BNT. Finally, the study aimed to explore whether there was a significant difference in the performance on the BNT when comparing male and female respondents. A significant difference was found between the South African and the Canadian sample in terms of item response. 40 items were revealed as problematic in a South African sample. Significant differences were found when comparing English respondents to Zulu respondents as well as when comparing Sotho respondents to English respondents. Although differences were found between male and female performance, the difference was not significant. Ultimately, no significant difference was found between monolingual and bilingual respondents.