Lifting Them Up
Demotivating Justice: White Americans' Outrage at Individual Bigotry May Reduce Action to Address Systematic Racial Inequity
Zachary Rothschild & Myles Hugee
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
These studies examine whether expressing outrage at a prejudiced individual may undermine justice-insensitive White Americans' motivation to engage in more costly actions addressing systemic racism. Study 1 (N = 896) manipulated White privilege salience and the opportunity to express outrage before measuring donations to a racial justice organization. Reminders of racial privilege increased White collective guilt, and donations among White U.S. participants low (but not high) in justice sensitivity. However, the opportunity to express outrage at another's prejudicial behavior negated privilege-induced reparative action. A second preregistered study (N = 1344) found this effect only when outrage was directed at a racialized (vs. non-racialized) injustice. A third preregistered study (N = 1133) replicated the effects using a more controlled manipulation of outrage expression and more ecologically valid outcomes. Findings suggest that salient racial privilege may motivate some White Americans to address systemic racism, but expressing outrage at another's bigotry may undermine this process.
Bank Competition and Entrepreneurial Gaps: Evidence from Bank Deregulation
Xiang Li
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
I analyze the effects of bank competition on gender and racial gaps in entrepreneurship. By leveraging interstate bank deregulation from 1994 to 2021, I find that stronger bank competition increases the quantity and quality of banking services offered to minority borrowers. Developing a novel measure of discrimination using narrative information in the complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I demonstrate that bank competition reduces discrimination, alleviating the financial constraints of female and minority entrepreneurs. Stronger bank competition also reduces gender and racial gaps in firm performance and business equity accumulation, promoting wealth equality and fostering equitable economic growth.
The Leniency of Low Expectations: Parental Incarceration, Race, and Teachers' Evaluations of Student Writing
Erin McCauley
American Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the era of mass incarceration, scholars have linked the expansion of the criminal legal system to the development and persistence of disparities in education. Leveraging a survey-based experiment with 1,492 high school teachers, I find that teachers grade the same essay less rigorously if they believe an otherwise identical male student has an incarcerated parent. Then I extend my analysis to examine the feedback provided by teachers, affording a unique window into the range of teacher responses that can characterize disparate treatment. I find evidence that the stigma of a student's parental incarceration status shapes teachers' evaluative behaviors, specifically in ways that are racialized and may have consequences for the educational trajectories of students with incarcerated parents.
Remembering the (College Football) Titans: Integrating College Football in the South
Benjamin Posmanick
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Becker's model of discrimination predicts that discriminating firms will have lower profitability due to discrimination. Therefore, a poorly-performing firm may choose to stop discriminating in an attempt to increase profitability. As predicted, using data on college football teams in the American South during the 1960s and 1970s, I find that worse teams, defined by their winning percentage or Associated Press ranking, tended to integrate sooner than better teams.
Gender, Confidence, and the Mismeasure of Intelligence, Competitiveness and Literacy
Glenn Harrison, Don Ross & Todd Swarthout
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The measurement of intelligence should identify and measure an individual's subjective confidence that a response to a test question is correct. Existing measures do not do that, nor do they use extrinsic financial incentive for truthful responses. We rectify both issues, and show that each matters for the measurement of intelligence, particularly for women. Our results on gender and confidence in the face of risk have wider applications in terms of the measurement of "competitiveness" and financial literacy. Contrary to received literature, women are more intelligent than men, compete when they should in risky settings, and are more literate.
The competence shield: Fostering competence perceptions weakens the dominance penalty for women in leadership
Zhiyu Feng et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although research has consistently found that women face social and economic penalties for displaying assertive, dominant agentic qualities often deemed necessary for leadership, limited work has examined how to mitigate the dominance penalty. Integrating the expectation states theory and multidimensional perspectives of agentic perceptions, we found that fostering perceived leader competence attenuated the dominance penalty. Across four studies, including two multiwave, multisource field studies (Studies 1 and 3), a critical incident experiment (Study 2a), and a vignette experiment (Study 2b), we observed the dominance penalty at lower but not higher levels of perceived leader competence. Perceived leader status mediated these effects so that higher (vs. lower) levels of perceived leader dominance led to less favorable leader status and effectiveness evaluations for women (but not for men) leaders, and these gender differences were eliminated at higher levels of perceived leader competence.
Can Narcissistic Women Leaders Be Seen as Effective? A Multi-Method Examination
Justin Ames et al.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using both neural and psychometric-based methodologies, we find that leader narcissism is correlated with neural structures that are indicative of taking an instrumental view of other people. Specifically, the convergence of the default mode and task-positive networks in the brain, which reflects cognition that is oriented toward an instrumental view of others, is associated with leader narcissism. However, in line with expectancy violation theory, we demonstrate that despite these cognitive tendencies that are potentially deleterious, women narcissistic leaders are able to realize more effective performance as compared to men narcissistic leaders. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings while considering limitations and future research directions.
Coalitional support regulates resource divisions in men
Elsa Ermer et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, September 2025
Abstract:
The logic of animal conflict predicts that organisms should assess cues of formidability to mitigate the costs of escalated contests. Accordingly, individual fighting ability has been shown to regulate the outcome of contests: All else equal, more formidable individuals claim a larger share of disputed resources, and less formidable individuals defer to their claims. The human ability to cooperate in groups complicates these interactions because a coalition of individuals can take resources from an individual that none of them could dominate when acting alone. We propose that the prevalence of male coalitional aggression in humans selected for psychological mechanisms that track how much coalitional support is immediately available to men when they are contesting a resource and use this information to regulate decisions about how to divide it. Specifically, men with coalitional allies present should be motivated to press their self-interest more than men who are acting alone -- even if the solitary man has allies elsewhere. Experiments using economic games in a university lab setting were employed to test this coalitional support hypothesis. Across six experiments employing three different economic games (total n = 496), coalitional support consistently regulated men's -- but not women's -- choices. These results suggest that coalitional support is an important factor regulating resource division in men. The fact that women pressed their self-interest, but did so whether allies were present versus absent, suggests that women's coalitional psychology was designed by different selection pressures than men's.
Student age and racial disparities in teachers' discipline evaluations
Yi Shao, Caitlin Briggs & Abigail Willis
Social Psychology of Education, July 2025
Abstract:
Racial disparities in school discipline have been previously identified, with studies like Okonofua and Elberhardt (2015) using scenarios with minor infractions indicating the role of teacher racial bias in these disparities. In this research, we sought to replicate and extend their study by adding the age of the student (child vs. teen) as an additional variable. Two studies recruited teachers to participate in this mixed-method research. The quantitative part was a mixed design with race of the student in the scenario as the between-subject variable and age as the within-subject variable. The qualitative part asked teachers to provide the possible causes of racial disparities in school discipline. We failed to replicate the previously observed racial effect, nor did we find an interaction between student age and race. Teachers were more inclined to attribute racial disparities in school discipline to teacher-related factors rather than to student-related factors. The most common factor nominated was implicit racial bias.