Employers’ Decision-Making based on Heuristics Essay

Employers in the United States, especially for those in the East coast or in the southern states, usually possess a common way of judging their appli squirtts found on many valuable attributes. In this case, the applier is a Hispanic Woman which seems to be enough to affect the employers decision. Why? Objectively speaking, it is be thrust of her race, her possible localize of origin and its social implications. Such racial bias in employer decision-making john be deconstructed into a number of heuristic aspects discussed in class. As a disclaimer, this paper strives to be objective and non-racist. It contains only fair or equiprobable assumptions on the possible thought patterns of employers, which are not absolute and whitethorn be proven false.RepresentativenessA Hispanic (Latina), even with a subordinates full point, will not escape a social grunge perpetrated by a wide afford social awareness indirectly attributed to electric chair Bushs policy against illegal immig rants. The context here is establish on tough U.S. actions against border crossings from Mexico to America. American Border Guards are use to apprehending Latinos in flight, which is very much portrayed in the movie Babel (2006). collectable to the significant number of illegal cross border cases by Hispanics, our Latina applicant will be viewed as such(prenominal), based on some of her forcible attributes (skin color, hair, and accent). An employer who is minimally trained in psychology will surely come to the mistake of considering a Latina applicant as one of those people who illegitimately crossed the Mexican border into the U.S. sometime in the past. Moreover, what will figure out the employers decision not to accept her is the U.S. Governments penalisation against those who harbor illegal aliens due to a number of government-declared risks terrorism, smuggling, human trafficking etc.AvailabilityThe employers bias against the Latina can be analyzed in terms of the availab ility of past memories regarding the hiring of Hispanic Americans. This employer may have see the assumed disadvantages of hiring Hispanics in the past. He/she may have hired individual like her in the past year, but was not very at rest with her performance due to a number of assumed complications like, say, she goes home to Mexico fooling thereby crossing the border. This context is very much related to employers find out in New Mexico where a large bulk of the labor suck actually reside in Mexico, and cross the border every day to show up for work.The employer may wish to avoid such border-crossing complications in the payroll so as not to arouse suspicion to the in-migration authorities about keeping an alien in the companys workforce. The pitying Resources Department may have collected a solidification of business intelligence in the past years about a significant number of other employers hiring Hispanic Americans and the disadvantages they caused to their companies (a n assumption only).If the disadvantages of a Hispanic workforce become frequent, it will naturally affect the availability of not so good memories about hiring them. Assuming that Hispanic Women have this incriminate behaviour, the employer finds it hard to avoid regressing to this statistical mean behaviour. S/he may be thinking about the odds that this Latina woman will be so contrasting from the rest. Of course, these ideas may be far fetched, but their universe of discourse in the minds of biased employers is not impossible.Attribution and Anchoring/AdjustmentThe abovementioned idea assumptions on availability lead to the framework of the attribution heuristic. The employer, through availability and representativeness, may have created his/her built-in logic on hiring Hispanic Americans may cause immigration problems, therefore company trouble. This self-made logic can spread to the whole Human Resources Department, especially in this case that the other tutor may call the shots. Human Resources may tend to raise its standards or benchmarks for them, thus becoming racist in its employment policy. The whole supposition of benchmarking and adjusting it for specific behaviors is the meat of anchoring and adjustment. Assuming that employers have built the bias based on the above heuristics, they possibly could have preferences over other races (whites, Chinese, etc.) such that they lower the benchmark for the other applicants except Hispanics. This idea is supported by the fact that our Hispanic applicant has a Masters Degree in Marketing and is still deemed unfit, even with a higher(prenominal) educational attainment.ConclusionsIt is no wonder that most reputable companies fill their Human Resources Department with people who have an objective awareness of human behavior across various origins and cultures. Recruitment committees are ideally made up of psychology graduates or behavioral science majors so they can objectively asses the fitness of applica nts while limiting the determining factors of racial, socio-political, economic bias. Also, the employers decisions should be affected by a sense of long term honor of the company by building the best mix of workforce from different races and origins, without biases and the mistake of overgeneralization.Referenceno author. (1997). Heuristic. Retrieved January 28, 2008, from http//www.sfb504.uni-mannheim.de/glossary/heurist.htm.Baron, J. (2000). The Effects of Overgeneralization on Public Policy. Retrieved January 28, 2008, from http//www.sas.upenn.edu/ index/overgen.pdf.Chapman, G. B. (2000). Incorporating the Irrelevant Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value. Retrieved January 28, 2008, from http//heuristics.behaviouralfinance.net/anchoring/ChJo00.pdf.Hilgard, E. R. (2001). Introduction to Psychology. New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.