Social bias blind spots: Attractiveness bias is seemingly tolerated because people fail to notice the bias.

Abstract

Discrimination remains a key challenge for social equity. A prerequisite for effective individual and societal responses to discrimination is that instances of it are detected. Yet, prejudice and discriminatory intent are rarely directly observable and the presence of discrimination has to be inferred from circumstantial evidence, such as the over- or underrepresentation of certain individuals (i.e., statistical bias). Here, we study how people judge outcomes that are statistically biased along different dimensions. Six primary and two supplemental studies with Dutch and U.S. participants (total N = 3,591, six preregistered) show that gender- and race-biased outcomes are perceived as much less fair than unbiased outcomes, but we do not observe the same for attractiveness-biased outcomes. While this pattern is partly explained by differences in the perceived legitimacy of different biases (i.e., people judge attractiveness bias as more acceptable than gender and race bias), we also find consistent evidence for an additional mechanism. People spontaneously pay attention to a few salient dimensions, such as gender and race, when scrutinizing decision outcomes for bias. Statistical bias along less salient dimensions, such as physical attractiveness, is more likely to go undetected. Our findings suggest that the (seeming) tolerance of attractiveness-biased outcomes is partly explained by people's failure to spontaneously notice that the outcome is attractiveness-biased in the first place. In other words, it is possible that people show muted responses to a biased outcome not because they actually approve of it, but because they fail to notice the bias. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).