Discrimination attributions in the workplace: A scoping review of experimental studies

Due to its often-ambiguous nature, workplace discrimination can be difficult to detect. Attributing situations to discrimination is the first step toward challenging and combatting such instances. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review synthesizes experimental research on the causal predictors of discrimination attributions in organizational settings. Our systematic literature search yielded 63 experimental studies from 31 articles published between 1999 and 2023, for a total of 20,725 participants across studies. These studies, conducted almost exclusively in the United States, focused primarily on the role of ambiguous information (action-related factors), the gender or racial prototypicality of targets (actor-related factors) and the unintended effects of pro-diversity policies (context-related factors). Findings indicate that status asymmetry and the prototypicality of victims and perpetrators increase the likelihood that a situation is considered discriminatory, while the presence of organizational diversity policies and equality frames tends to reduce it. We encourage future research to broaden its scope to include other countries and grounds of discrimination, and to pay more attention to differences in attributions across actors and contexts.