Identifying Variants
Racial bias in perceptions of disease and policy
Sophie Trawalter, Nana-Bilkisu Habib & James Druckman
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Narratives about Africa as dark, depraved, and diseased justified the exploitation of African land and people. Today, these narratives may still have a hold on people’s fears about disease. We test this in three (pre-COVID-19) experiments (N = 1,803). Across studies, we find that participants report greater worry about a pandemic originating in Africa (vs. elsewhere). In turn, they report greater support for travel bans and for loosening abortion restrictions. We then document these narratives in an archival study of newspaper articles of the 2015–2016 Zika pandemic (N = 1,475). We find that articles were more negative -- for example, they included more death-related words -- if they mentioned Africa. Finally, we replicate the experimental results within the COVID-19 context, using a representative sample (N = 1,200). Taken together, the studies make clear that reactions to pandemics are biased, and in a way consistent with historical narratives about race and Africa.
Change and Continuity in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality across the Lifespan
David Ekstam
Journal of Homosexuality, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines differential stability in attitudes toward homosexuality using panel data representative of the American adult population. While attitudes toward homosexuality have shifted considerably on the aggregate-level over the past few decades, this study shows that such attitudes are remarkably stable on the individual-level. Employing conditional change models, this study also provides a test of the aging-stability hypothesis with regard to attitudes toward homosexuality. That hypothesis is confirmed, as attitude stability is found to gradually increase with age. However, no other socio-demographic variables are found to have a consistent relationship with stability. The finding of an age-graded increase in stability suggests that attitudes toward homosexuality are formed predominantly early in life and that susceptibility to attitude change declines across the adult lifespan. This finding also supports a generational replacement explanation of recent changes in American public opinion on homosexuality as aging-stability translates into cohort effects on the aggregate-level.
Stereotyping at the intersection of race and weight: Diluted threat stereotyping of obese Black men
Mattea Sim, Steven Almaraz & Kurt Hugenberg
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Black men are generally stereotyped as physically formidable and threatening. Across 3 studies, we investigate whether this threat stereotyping is diluted when Black men are obese. We competitively tested two hypotheses investigating whether obese Black men are seen as less racially stereotypical overall, or as uniquely less threatening (but still racially stereotypic more broadly). In Study 1, perceivers were less likely to list threat as a stereotype of obese Black men than weight-unspecified Black men. In Study 2, obese Black men were subject to reduced threat stereotypes, but were still subject to other stereotypes about Black men. Finally, in Study 3 this threat-specific dilution led perceivers to anticipate feeling less threatened by obese Black men, and believe police use-of-force is less justified toward obese Black men, relative to average-weight Black men (Study 3). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the well-established stereotype of Black men as threatening is not applied equally across weight. Instead, contradicting stereotypes of obese individuals as physically and psychologically incapable of threat dilutes the Black-threat stereotype. However, obese Black men are still subject to harmful race-based stereotypes unrelated to threat.
Physical Attractiveness Biases Judgments Pertaining to the Moral Domain of Purity
Christoph Klebl et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity.
Unfit Stewards: The Role of the Intensive Pet Parenting Ideology in Constructing Racialized Narratives
Adilia James
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars have found that privileged, white individuals in integrated neighborhoods construct narratives that people of color (POC) have relationships with pets that are culturally different and morally questionable. They use these narratives to justify surveilling, punishing, and excluding their POC neighbors. How do privileged white people come up with the pet-related narratives they use as part of racialization processes? The dual purposes in this paper are to identify the constitutive elements of the intensive pet parenting ideology and show how individuals rely on this ideology to construct pet-related, racialized narratives. I extend the current discussion about the use of pet-related, racialized narratives by taking a closer look at the white-dominated veterinary profession. I conducted 44 in-depth interviews with a racially-diverse group of employed veterinarians and veterinary college students to determine if and how they rely on the intensive pet parenting ideology to explain a broad racial/ethnic process such as occupational segregation. Respondents proposed that POC cultures do not promote a self-sacrificing love for common pet species that would engender a passion for veterinary medicine within individuals of color. In this manner, they drew on the intensive pet parenting ideology to both racialize people and naturalize POC exclusion from the veterinary profession.
How race and gender shape the development of social prototypes in the United States
Ryan Lei et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present studies examined how gender and race information shape children’s prototypes of various social categories. Children (N = 543; Mage = 5.81, range = 2.75–10.62; 281 girls, 262 boys; 193 White, 114 Asian, 71 Black, 50 Hispanic, 39 Multiracial, 7 Middle-Eastern, 69 race unreported) most often chose White people as prototypical of boys and men — a pattern that increased with age. For female gender categories, children most often selected a White girl as prototypical of girls, but an Asian woman as prototypical of women. For superordinate social categories (person and kid), children chose members of their own gender as most representative. Overall, the findings reveal how cultural ideologies and children’s own group memberships interact to shape the development of social prototypes across childhood.
Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping
Christopher Petsko, Ashleigh Shelby Rosette & Galen Bodenhausen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person’s multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds — identity-specific schemas for categorizing others — and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets’ racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets’ other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses.
Negative Patient Descriptors: Documenting Racial Bias In The Electronic Health Record
Michael Sun et al.
Health Affairs, February 2022, Pages 203-211
Abstract:
Little is known about how racism and bias may be communicated in the medical record. This study used machine learning to analyze electronic health records (EHRs) from an urban academic medical center and to investigate whether providers’ use of negative patient descriptors varied by patient race or ethnicity. We analyzed a sample of 40,113 history and physical notes (January 2019–October 2020) from 18,459 patients for sentences containing a negative descriptor (for example, resistant or noncompliant) of the patient or the patient’s behavior. We used mixed effects logistic regression to determine the odds of finding at least one negative descriptor as a function of the patient’s race or ethnicity, controlling for sociodemographic and health characteristics. Compared with White patients, Black patients had 2.54 times the odds of having at least one negative descriptor in the history and physical notes. Our findings raise concerns about stigmatizing language in the EHR and its potential to exacerbate racial and ethnic health care disparities.
Skin Color and Skin Tone Diversity in Human Sexuality Textbook Anatomical Diagrams
Yael Rosenstock Gonzalez, Deana Williams & Debby Herbenick
Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Little is known about skin tone and skin color representation within sexuality education materials. A content analysis was performed to assess skin tone and skin color diversity among anatomical images (n = 182) within eight contemporary, college-level human sexuality textbooks. Of these images, 1.1% represented dark skin tones while 83.5% represented light skin tones. Skin colors commonly associated with Black and Brown people were underrepresented in comparison to colors generally associated with white or white-presenting people such as conch, which comprised 42.3% (n = 77) of anatomical images. We encourage sex therapists to use racially conscious and inclusive imagery and educational materials when serving clients.
Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female
Susan Wardle et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 February 2022
Abstract:
Despite our fluency in reading human faces, sometimes we mistakenly perceive illusory faces in objects, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. Although illusory faces share some neural mechanisms with real faces, it is unknown to what degree pareidolia engages higher-level social perception beyond the detection of a face. In a series of large-scale behavioral experiments (ntotal = 3,815 adults), we found that illusory faces in inanimate objects are readily perceived to have a specific emotional expression, age, and gender. Most strikingly, we observed a strong bias to perceive illusory faces as male rather than female. This male bias could not be explained by preexisting semantic or visual gender associations with the objects, or by visual features in the images. Rather, this robust bias in the perception of gender for illusory faces reveals a cognitive bias arising from a broadly tuned face evaluation system in which minimally viable face percepts are more likely to be perceived as male.
Bridging Boundaries? The Effect of Genetic Ancestry Testing on Ties across Racial Groups
Wendy Roth, Rochelle Côté & Jasmyne Eastmond
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
The phenomenon of widespread genetic ancestry testing has raised questions about its social impact, particularly on issues of race. Some accounts suggest testing can promote bridging social capital – connections between racial groups. In this multi-method paper, we ask whether (1) taking genetic ancestry tests (GATs) and (2) receiving results of African, Asian, or Native American ancestry increases network racial diversity for White Americans. We use a randomized controlled trial of 802 White, non-Hispanic Americans, half of whom received GATs. Unexpected findings show that test-takers’ network racial diversity decreases after testing. Using 58 follow-up interviews, we develop and test a possible theory, finding initial evidence that test-takers’ network racial diversity declines because they reconsider their racial appraisals of others in their networks.
My Fight or Yours: Stereotypes of Activists From Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups
Brooke Burrows, Hema Preya Selvanathan & Brian Lickel
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
In social movements, activists may belong to either the disadvantaged or the advantaged group (e.g., Black racial justice activists or White racial justice activists). Across three experimental survey studies, we examined the content of these stereotypes by asking participants to freely generate a list of characteristics to describe each target group — a classic paradigm in stereotype research. Specifically, we examined the stereotypes applied to Black and White activists within racial justice movements (Study 1, n = 154), female and male activists within feminist movements (Study 2, n =134), and LBGT and straight activists within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movements (Study 3, n =156). We found that the “activist” category was consistently differentiated into subcategories based on group status: Disadvantaged group activists were stereotyped as strong and aggressive, whereas advantaged group activists were stereotyped as altruistic and superficial. These findings underscore the importance of considering status differences to understand the social perception of activists.
Does The Betting Industry Price Gender? Evidence from Professional Tennis
Joxe Maria Barrutiabengoa, Pilar Corredor & Luis Muga
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research addresses the importance of gender in the pricing process of the sports betting industry. Specifically, we investigate the impact of gender in the prices that bookmakers offer for tennis matches. Despite widespread evidence of gender bias both in the practice of the sport and its media coverage, tennis is one of the sports that has done most to achieve equality. The analysis of 51,881 tennis matches reveals that betting firms quote higher prices for women's matches than for men's, even when considering uncertainty due to the surprise factor and the media attention. The separate analysis of two bookmakers strengthens the evidence for the role of media attention as a source of gender-related information asymmetry.