Honors Program Theses

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Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Helen Harton, Honors Thesis Advisor

Keywords

Hispanic Americans; Discrimination in employment;

Abstract

There has been an influx of Hispanic immigrants in the United States, and negative attitudes toward these individuals have been increasingly expressed in the current political climate. There is discrimination toward the Hispanic community, and this includes in the workplace. One factor that may impact discrimination is accents. This study examined perceptions of women with Hispanic accents in an organizational context. Most previous research in this area has examined the perceptions of male job candidates with other types of accents. 314 participants evaluated a female job candidate who either had a Hispanic accent, did not have an accent (but had a Hispanic-sounding name), or did not have a Hispanic accent or name for one of two positions— nanny, which may relate to stereotypes of Hispanic females as caring, or an office job. To test potential ingroup biases, I recruited participants with either English or Spanish as a first language. Whereas accent did not influence ratings of hireability, job suitability, or personal characteristics, perceptions of competence were impacted by accent, with those with a Hispanic accent being viewed as less competent than those with an Anglo accent. This perception could result in differences in treatment of individuals in the workplace. Keywords: Immigration, Social Identity Theory, Intergroup Threat Theory, Accent, Gender

Year of Submission

2025

Department

Department of Psychology

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Object Description

1 PDF file (49 pages)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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