WiE Brown Bag Seminar - January

Join us for our first session of the WiE Brown Bag Seminar in 2026 featuring Charlotte Cordes, a fifth-year PhD candidate at LMU Munich.

Motivated memory and favoritism

Abstract: 

Many important decisions that involve the judgment of others are based on recalled information. Because memory is noisy and potentially biased, it can influence how we judge people. This suggests that reliance on memory may interact with favoritism – a form of discrimination that remains widespread, even though it carries harmful economic consequences and raises ethical concerns. This paper investigates how reliance on memory amplifies favoritism in personnel decisions. In an online experiment, managers make incentivized hiring decisions regarding workers of varying quality. Two experimental manipulations isolate the causal effect of memory on favoritism. First, I experimentally vary managers’ preferences for workers. Second, I vary between-subjects whether managers base their choices on workers’ actual quality or on their recall of th…