Affirmative Action and Discriminatory Beliefs

Abstract
The goal of our study is to understand to what extent affirmative action beneficiaries are penalized by their affirmative action status, irrespective of their performance/competence. We have examined this question through an online experiment conducted with university students in India. Our experiment builds on existing literature (eg. Heilman, Block and Stathatos, 1997, Academy of Management Journal among others), who show that managers in the US tend to rate female affirmative action hires less well and recommend lower salary increases than for women hired without affirmative action or for men. Given the context of affirmative action, or reservations in India, we have been able to go a step further in the understanding of how identity interacts with the perception of affirmative action beneficiaries. We make use of the fact that affirmative action in India is not only based on a caste (SC-ST), but also based on income (EWS), to study whether the perception of the competence and the allocation of the rewards depends on the criteria on which affirmative action is based. We also study whether the allocation of rewards depends on the identity and the characteristics of those who were potentially harmed by affirmative action, i.e. those who were not selected for reward because of affirmative action. We find that generally affirmative action beneficiaries are penalised in terms of perceptions of ability, especially so for affirmative action based on caste. Surprisingly, when distributing rewards, affirmative action beneficiaries are rewarded despite the clear effect on lower perceptions of ability.