SEMINAR: dr. Ole Brüggemann -The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Discrimination at Work: A Survey Experiment in Four European Countries

Abstract: Workplace discrimination is widespread and has well-documented consequences for job outcomes and for employees’ health. Social-scientific research has largely measured (perceived) exposure, through self-reports in surveys or field experiments, but these approaches offer limited insight into the attribution process by which people come to interpret an event as discriminatory. Understanding these attributions is especially interesting given that discrimination increasingly takes more subtle and ambiguous forms, introducing an ambiguity that can hinder recognition and discourage reporting. We therefore ask: how do people decide whether a workplace situation counts as discrimination? Prior work shows that people tend to rely on narrow, prototypical definitions of discrimination, typically overt and intentional acts, but these dimensions of the attribution process are rarely investigated jointly making conclusions about their relative importance impossible. We address this gap with a pre-registered factorial survey experiment in which respondents evaluate fictitious workplace scenarios involving a supervisor, a subordinate, and bystanding colleagues. The design randomly varies the actors’ gender and ethnicity, the nature of the event (subtlety, formality, intentionality, frequency), and the context (bystander support, organizational policies), allowing us to estimate their independent and combined effects on whether a situation is attributed to discrimination. We additionally randomize whether respondents take a bystander or a target perspective, testing whether the same situation is judged differently depending on the actor. I will present results from a multinational survey (UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain) collected in May-July 2026 as part of the TARGETS project.

Bio: Ole is currently a research fellow at the European University Institute and currently working in the ERC-funded project ‘TARGETS’ with Prof. Valentina di Stasio. His research broadly centres around perceptions of social inequalities in the labour market and their behavioural and political consequences. Methodogically, he specialises in survey experimental approaches (e.g. factorial survey experiments and information provision experiments) together with quantitative analysis of survey and administrative data. He holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz.

To join the seminar: reach out to s.l.sprong@uu.nl or a.m.p.schlette@uu.nl