Just like them
Assumptions about life hardship and pain perception
Kelly Hoffman & Sophie Trawalter
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present work examines whether people assume that those who have faced hardship feel less pain than those who have not, and whether this belief contributes to the perception that Blacks feel less pain than Whites. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants received information about a Black and/or White target person’s life hardship and then rated the target person’s pain. Participants reported that the target individual would feel less pain if s/he had experienced greater hardship. Importantly, racial bias emerged but only when hardship information was consistent with expectations about race and life hardship; that is, participants reported that the Black (vs. White) target individual would feel less pain only if s/he had experienced greater hardship. In Experiment 3, participants read that hardship either toughens or weakens the body, and then rated a Black or White target person’s pain. Racial bias emerged but only when supported by lay beliefs. Specifically, participants reported that the Black (vs. White) target individual would feel less pain but only if they endorsed the belief that hardship leads to toughness. Taken together, these findings suggest that perceptions of hardship shape perceptions of pain and contribute to racial bias in pain perception. These findings also suggest that eliminating this racial bias will require challenging lay beliefs; it will require the recognition that people who have faced great hardship feel just as much, if not more, pain.
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The Role of Gender, Class, and Religion in Biracial Americans’ Racial Labeling Decisions
Lauren Davenport
American Sociological Review, February 2016, Pages 57-84
Abstract:
Racial attachments are understood to be socially constructed and endogenous to gender, socioeconomic, and religious identities. Yet we know surprisingly little about the effect of such identities on the particular racial labels that individuals self-select. In this article, I investigate how social identities shape the racial labels chosen by biracial individuals in the United States, a rapidly growing population who have multiple labeling options. Examining national surveys of more than 37,000 respondents of Latino-white, Asian-white, and black-white parentage, I disentangle how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity influence racial labeling decisions. Across biracial subgroups and net of all other influences, economic affluence and Jewish identity predict whiter self-identification, whereas belonging to a religion more commonly associated with racial minorities is associated with a minority identification. Gender, however, is the single best predictor of identification, with biracial women markedly more likely than biracial men to identify as multiracial. These findings help us better understand the contextual nature of racial identification and the processes via which social identities interact with racial meanings in the United States.
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The Association Between Men’s Sexist Attitudes and Facial Hair
Julian Oldmeadow & Barnaby Dixson
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Facial hair, like many masculine secondary sexual traits, plays a significant role in perceptions of an array of sociosexual traits in men. While there is consensus that beards enhance perceptions of masculinity, age, social dominance, and aggressiveness, the perceived attractiveness of facial hair varies greatly across women. Given the ease with which facial hair can be groomed and removed entirely, why should some men retain beards and others choose to remove them? We hypothesized that men with relatively sexist attitudes would be more likely to allow their facial hair to grow than men with less sexist attitudes. Men from the USA (n = 223) and India (n = 309) completed an online survey measuring demographic variables, ambivalent sexism, and facial hair status. After controlling for demographic variables, men with facial hair were significantly higher in hostile sexism than clean-shaven men; hostile sexism was a significant predictor of facial hair status over and above demographic variables; and facial hair was more frequent among ambivalent and hostile sexists than among benevolent and non-sexists. It is suggested that sexist men choose to grow facial hair because it maximizes sexual dimorphism and augments perceived masculinity and dominance.
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Julie Van de Vyver et al.
Psychological Science, February 2016, Pages 169-177
Abstract:
Major terrorist events, such as the recent attacks in Ankara, Sinai, and Paris, can have profound effects on a nation’s values, attitudes, and prejudices. Yet psychological evidence testing the impact of such events via data collected immediately before and after an attack is understandably rare. In the present research, we tested the independent and joint effects of threat (the July 7, 2005, London bombings) and political ideology on endorsement of moral foundations and prejudices among two nationally representative samples (combined N = 2,031) about 6 weeks before and 1 month after the London bombings. After the bombings, there was greater endorsement of the in-group foundation, lower endorsement of the fairness-reciprocity foundation, and stronger prejudices toward Muslims and immigrants. The differences in both the endorsement of the foundations and the prejudices were larger among people with a liberal orientation than among those with a conservative orientation. Furthermore, the changes in endorsement of moral foundations among liberals explained their increases in prejudice. The results highlight the value of psychological theory and research for understanding societal changes in attitudes and prejudices after major terrorist events.
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Racial Remittances: The Effect of Migration on Racial Ideologies in Mexico and the United States
Sylvia Zamora
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has examined how racial ideologies vary across national contexts, but relatively few scholars have investigated how ideologies might be transmitted across national boundaries. The author examines how antiblack racial ideologies in the United States are circulated back to the immigrant-sending community via social ties held between U.S. immigrants and non-migrants, who have never left their home societies. Drawing on 75 in-depth interviews with Mexicans in Mexico and the United States, the author shows how immigrant perceptions of black Americans are relayed back to nonmigrants as racial remittances - the movement of racial discourses and stereotypes across national borders. Whereas recent scholarship has documented immigrants’ preference to maintain social distance from black Americans, the author’s findings challenge assumptions that these attitudes are merely a product of the U.S. assimilation process or a reflection of Latin American antiblack racism. Rather, this research suggests that these two processes interact and have consequences pertaining to how immigrants relate to black Americans upon migration to the United States. The article ends with a discussion of the findings’ implications for how new immigrants are navigating the evolving U.S. racial order.
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Nobody’s business? White male privilege in media coverage of intimate partner violence
Joanna Rae Pepin
Sociological Spectrum, forthcoming
Abstract:
Portrayals of celebrities perpetrating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are ideal for understanding the association between gender and racial privilege in representations of social problems. Unlike prior scholarship on framing of IPV, with celebrity perpetrators, race can be analyzed as an important aspect. Using 330 news articles about 66 celebrities, I find patterns of reporting consistent with male privilege that sanctions men’s violence against women, whereas the differential treatment of Black men fosters a racialized interpretation that pathologizes Black men. Black men's IPV is more often criminalized, with criminal imagery included 3 times more often in articles about Black celebrities than White celebrities. By presenting violence as an escalation of mutual conflict and excusing it due to mitigating circumstances, such as inebriation, White men's violence is justified 2½ times more often than Black men's IPV. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of racial privilege in the social construction of IPV.
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Edward Vargas et al.
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Discrimination based on one’s racial or ethnic background is one of the oldest and most perverse practices in the United States. Although much research has relied on self-reported racial categories, a growing body of research is designed to measure race through socially assigned race. Socially assigned or ascribed race measures how individuals feel they are classified by other people. In this study, the authors draw on the socially assigned race literature and explore the impact of socially assigned race on experiences with discrimination using a 2011 nationally representative sample of Latina/os (n = 1,200). Although much of the current research on Latina/os has been focused on aggregation across national-origin group members, this study marks a deviation in the use of socially assigned race and national origin to understand how being ascribed as Mexican is associated with experiences of discrimination. The authors find evidence that being ascribed as Mexican increases the likelihood of experiencing discrimination relative to being ascribed as White or Latina/o. Furthermore, the authors find that being misclassified as Mexican (ascribed as Mexican but not of Mexican origin) is associated with a higher likelihood of experiencing discrimination compared with being ascribed as White, ascribed as Latina/o, and correctly ascribed as Mexican. The authors provide evidence that socially assigned race is a valuable complement to self-identified race/ethnicity for scholars interested in assessing the impact of race/ethnicity on a wide range of outcomes.
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Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?
Andrew Todd, Kelsey Thiem & Rebecca Neel
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality can lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons. In four experiments, we investigated whether these biases extend even to young Black boys (5-year-olds). White participants completed sequential priming tasks in which they categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects and words after brief presentations of faces of various races (Black and White) and ages (children and adults). Results consistently revealed that participants had less difficulty (i.e., faster response times, fewer errors) identifying threatening stimuli and more difficulty identifying nonthreatening stimuli after seeing Black faces than after seeing White faces, and this racial bias was equally strong following adult and child faces. Process-dissociation-procedure analyses further revealed that these effects were driven entirely by automatic (i.e., unintentional) racial biases. The collective findings suggest that the perceived threat commonly associated with Black men may generalize even to young Black boys.
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From Similitude to Success: The Effects of Facial Resemblance on Perceptions of Team Effectiveness
Ze Wang, Xin He & Fan Liu
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scant empirical research has focused on how impressions of teams are formed based on members’ collective appearance, even though team photos are omnipresent in visual communications and teamwork is a common theme to elicit positive responses. Across 4 studies, we show that a subtle increase in the facial resemblance among team members enhances observers’ evaluations of team effectiveness. This resemblance effect is mediated by perceived cooperative intent among team players. Furthermore, we demonstrate a reversal of the resemblance effect through the moderating role of information valence and extend the finding from team perception to behavioral intention. These results hold across different manipulations, contexts, stimuli, and sample characteristics. Collectively, this research presents the first empirical evidence that inferences based on facial morphology persist well beyond evaluations of individuals to influence the way a team, as a whole, is perceived.
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Are Smart People Less Racist? Verbal Ability, Anti-Black Prejudice, and the Principle-Policy Paradox
Geoffrey Wodtke
Social Problems, Winter 2016, Pages 21-45
Abstract:
It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality. According to this perspective, ideological refinement occurs in response to shifting patterns of racial conflict and is characterized by rejection of overt prejudice, superficial support for racial equality in principle, and opposition to policies that challenge the dominant group’s status. This study estimates the impact of verbal ability on a comprehensive set of racial attitudes, including anti-black prejudice, views about black-white equality in principle, and racial policy support. It also investigates cohort differences in the effects of verbal ability on these attitudes. Results suggest that high-ability whites are less likely than low-ability whites to report prejudicial attitudes and more likely to support racial equality in principle. Despite these liberalizing effects, high-ability whites are no more likely to support a variety of remedial policies for racial inequality. Results also suggest that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of verbal ability on anti-black prejudice and views about racial equality in principle emerged slowly over time, consistent with ideological refinement theory.
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White ≠ Poor: Whites Distance, Derogate, and Deny Low-Status Ingroup Members
Jonathan Kunstman, Ashby Plant & Jason Deska
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, February 2016, Pages 230-243
Abstract:
Throughout society, White people of low socioeconomic status (SES) face prejudice, often from racial ingroup members. The present research tested the ingroup distancing effect, which predicts that Whites’ negative reactions to low-SES ingroup members are motivated responses to perceived threats to their personal and group-level status. To cope with perceived status threats, White people psychologically and physically distance themselves from low-SES Whites. Four studies provide converging support for this theorizing. Among White participants, low-SES Whites elicited derogation, impaired racial categorization and memory, and inflated perceived personal status. White participants explicitly perceived low-SES Whites as greater status threats than low-SES Blacks, and these perceptions of threat predicted increased discomfort in anticipated social situations with low-SES White targets. Moreover, threatened status led Whites who strongly identified with their racial ingroup to physically distance themselves from a low-SES White partner. This research demonstrates that concerns with status motivate prejudice against ingroup members.
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Haters are all the same: Perceptions of group homogeneity following positive vs. negative feedback
Kenneth Savitsky et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The more similar the members of a group are to one another, the less reliable their collective judgments are likely to be. One way for individuals to respond to negative feedback from a group may thus be to adjust their perceptions of the group's homogeneity, enabling them to dismiss the feedback as unreliable. We show that individuals appreciate this logic (Study 1) and that they put it to strategic use by regarding the members of a group as more homogenous when the group judges them negatively than when it judges them positively (Studies 2, 3, and 4). We underscore the self-protective nature of this tendency by showing that individuals adjust their perceptions of a group's homogeneity more when they themselves are the target of the group's judgment than when the group judges someone else (Study 4).
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Michael Thai, Matthew Hornsey & Fiona Kate Barlow
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People commonly reference minority friendships when expressing conceivably prejudiced attitudes. The prevalence of this strategy suggests a widespread belief that having minority friends makes one look less racist, but to date, there is little research demonstrating whether or not this is the case. White and Asian participants were presented with a Facebook profile depicting a White target who posted an anti-Asian statement. Being depicted with Asian friends (Study 1) or even verbally claiming that they had Asian friends (Study 2) reduced attributions of racism irrespective of whether they were being evaluated by White or Asian observers. Furthermore, the presence of Asian friends made the conceivably racist comments seem relatively benign, and observers were less offended and upset by them. The data suggest that minority friendships can partially offset costs associated with expressing prejudice.
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Inferring Identity From Language: Linguistic Intergroup Bias Informs Social Categorization
Shanette Porter, Michelle Rheinschmidt-Same & Jennifer Richeson
Psychological Science, January 2016, Pages 94-102
Abstract:
The present research examined whether a communicator’s verbal, implicit message regarding a target is used as a cue for inferring that communicator’s social identity. Previous research has found linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) in individuals’ speech: They use abstract language to describe in-group targets’ desirable behaviors and concrete language to describe their undesirable behaviors (favorable LIB), but use concrete language for out-group targets’ desirable behaviors and abstract language for their undesirable behaviors (unfavorable LIB). Consequently, one can infer the type of language a communicator is likely to use to describe in-group and out-group targets. We hypothesized and found evidence for the reverse inference. Across four studies, individuals inferred a communicator’s social identity on the basis of the communicator’s use of an LIB. Specifically, participants more strongly believed that a communicator and target shared a social identity when the communicator used the favorable, rather than the unfavorable, LIB in describing that target.
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Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: II. Intervention Effectiveness Across Time
Calvin Lai
Harvard Working Paper, January 2016
Abstract:
Implicit prejudice is malleable, but does that change last? We tested nine interventions (eight real and one sham) that have been demonstrated to reduce implicit racial prejudice temporarily to determine whether their effects also persisted over time. In two studies with a total of 6,321 participants, all nine interventions immediately reduced implicit prejudice, but none were effective after a delay of several hours to several days. We also found that these interventions did not change explicit racial prejudice and were not reliably moderated by motivations to respond without prejudice. Short-term malleability in implicit prejudice does not necessarily lead to longterm change, raising new questions about the flexibility and stability of implicit attitudes.
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Sayaka Sato, Ute Gabriel & Pascal Gygax
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The generic use of masculine plural forms in grammatical gender languages has been criticized for activating unequal gender representations that are male dominant. The present study examined whether the recently introduced gender-neutral forms of nominalized adjectives and participles in German provide references that induce more balanced representations. We used cross-linguistic differences as a means to illustrate the flexibility of the gender representation system and investigated both native and nonnative (French-German bilinguals) speakers of German. Although a masculine bias persisted when participants read role nouns in the masculine plural form, the study suggests that the usage of nominalized forms can attenuate this male bias, even for nonnative speakers. The results of the study provide further support for the use of gender-neutral language.
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Jillian Swencionis & Susan Fiske
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2016, Pages 27-34
Abstract:
We hypothesized participants would adopt diverging impression management strategies when interacting with lower- versus higher-status others, to disconfirm status-based stereotypes of their own respective coldness or incompetence. In Study 1, downward comparers downplayed their own competence to appear warmer, and upward comparers downplayed their own warmth to appear more competent. In status comparisons with counter-stereotypical targets, Studies 2a and 2b showed impression management strategies no longer diverge, but effects do not reverse, suggesting a combination of stereotype-disconfirming and target trait-matching goals. Study 3 replicates diverging strategies in downward and upward status comparisons and suggests diverging reasons for these strategies: Downward comparers perceive reason to disconfirm status-based stereotypes, while upward comparers perceive reason to match their comparison target. Together, these studies show mere status differences shift individuals' interaction goals in conveying two central dimensions of impression formation, warmth and competence.