Base Rates Can Be Both Socially Useful and Socially Undesirable: Review of Grawitch et al. (2022)

Grawitch and colleagues (2022) reported three studies that tested whether people evaluate ambiguous cases of sexism differently depending on the genders of those involved. Participants read about an interaction between a banker and a customer in which the banker commented on the customer’s nice appearance, discouraged the customer from making their preferred investment, and placed an arm around the customer’s shoulders when thanking the customer for their business. The results consistently showed that people evaluated this ambiguous behavior the least favorably and the most sexist when the banker was a man and the customer was a woman. And there seemed to be a fairly consistent pattern that people evaluated this ambiguous behavior less favorably in mixed-sexpairs (man to woman or woman to man) than same-sex pairs (woman to woman or man to man). Other patterns of results were a bit more mixed or supported only in one study.The methods seem reasonable to me, and the results are very plausible, so my little review/commentary will only focus on two aspects of the paper. First, I found the theoretical narrative excessively complicated and suspect the simple use of (accurate) base rates is a far more parsimonious explanation for the results. Second, there are a few additional statistics I would like to see that I outline below