Scale dichotomization reduces customer racial discrimination and income inequality.

ABSTRACT: Online platforms are rife with racial discrimination¹, but current interventions focus on employers^2,3 rather than customers. We propose a customer-facing solution: changing to a two-point rating scale (dichotomization). Compared with the ubiquitous five-star scale, we argue that dichotomization reduces modern racial discrimination by focusing evaluators on the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' performance, thereby reducing how personal beliefs shape customer assessments. Study 1 is a quasi-natural experiment on a home-services labour platform (n = 69,971) in which the company exogenously changed from a five-star scale to a dichotomous scale (thumbs up or thumbs down). Dichotomization eliminated customers' racial discrimination whereby non-white workers received lo

SUBMITTER: Botelho TL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11903317 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature