Individuals are known to categorize others into social groups based on cues like race and gender and to experience relative discomfort when interacting with “outgroup” members. Two experimental studies were used to examine whether actor demographic cues in situational judgment assessment items completed by test takers in a simulated employee selection context may lead to differences in their performance and reactions to the hiring organization. In both studies, test takers assumed the perspective of actors shown in video-based scenarios and indicated how they would respond to interaction partners (IPs) to whom they were racially similar or dissimilar. In Study 1, a given test taker responded to IPs of a constant gender; in Study 2, IPs’ gender varied across scenarios within each condition. In Study 1, Black test takers spent more time and scored better on two of the four scenarios when responding to racially similar IPs. These effects were not found in Study 2, but demographic cues showed new interactive effects on performance and reactions. We discuss the implications of different findings across the two studies.

众所周知，个人会根据种族和性别等线索将他人归入社会群体，并在与“外群体”成员互动时会感到相对不适。两项实验研究用于检验应试者在模拟员工选择环境中完成的情境判断评估项目中的演员人口统计线索是否会导致他们的表现和对招聘组织的反应的差异。在这两项研究中，考生都假设了基于视频的场景中显示的演员的观点，并表明他们将如何回应与他们种族相似或不同的互动伙伴 (IP)。在研究 1 中，给定的应试者对固定性别的 IP 做出反应；在研究 2 中，IP 的性别在每个条件下的场景中都有所不同。在研究 1 中，在回答种族相似的 IP 时，黑人考生在四种情况中的两种情况下花费了更多时间并且得分更高。在研究 2 中没有发现这些影响，但人口统计线索显示了对表现和反应的新交互影响。我们讨论了两项研究中不同发现的影响。