Petr Parshakov presented a study at NTNU seminar

Petr Parshakov, researcher at ID Lab, presented the study “How Heuristic Hiring Practices Lead to Nonoptimal Outcomes: The Case of Obese Workers” at the Seminar of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Of increasing social concern is behavior toward marginalized groups. Biased treatment is no longer accepted. Although often neglected, one group that suffers from discrimination is obese people, who still have to cope with many hindrances. In the workplace, for example, recruiters are less likely to hire obese candidates, perhaps because they think that the performance of obese workers is inferior to that of nonobese ones. Using data from the realm of eSports, we examine the performance of non-obese, moderately obese, and severely obese players. For shorter tasks, nonobese players performed better than obese ones. For longer tasks, however, severely obese players outperformed all others, and their advantage increased with task duration. The results have implications for the hiring process.