'You Lost Me at Hello' : How and When Accent-Based Biases are Expressed and Suppressed

This research examines customer biases relating to employee accents in call service encounters. Extant research and practitioners generally assume that customers automatically evaluate call service employees with a negatively biased accent lower than employees with a standard accent. However, using the Justification-Suppression Model as a framework, we argue that customers frequently suppress accent biases towards call service employees. We conduct three empirical studies. Our findings indicate that customers rate employees with a negatively biased accent lower only when a service outcome is unfavorable for customers. Yet, positive accent biases only impact customer evaluations when service outcomes are favorable for customers. Additionally, we demonstrate that the suppression and justification of accent biases rely on both cognitive and affective mechanisms. Finally, we show that customers who are informed of the frequency of a favorable versus unfavorable outcome are more likely to suppress biases