Your reputation precedes you
The Impact of Intergroup Contact on Racial Attitudes and Revealed Preferences
Scott Carrell, Mark Hoekstra & James West
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
Understanding whether racial attitudes are malleable is critical for addressing the underlying causes of racial discrimination. We examine whether white males' stated attitudes and behavior toward African Americans change based on the number and type of black peers to whom they are exposed. To overcome selection bias, we exploit data from the U.S. Air Force Academy in which students are randomly assigned to peer groups. Results show significant evidence in favor of the contact hypothesis. White males are significantly affected by both the number (quantity) and aptitude (quality) of the black peers with whom they are exposed. Specifically, white men randomly assigned to higher-aptitude black peers report being more accepting of blacks in general and are more likely to match with a black roommate the following year after reassignment to a new peer group with a different set of black peers. We also find that, ceteris paribus, exposure to more black peers significantly increases the probability of a bi-racial roommate match.
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Political Ideology, Skin Tone, and the Psychology of Candidate Evaluations
Amy Lerman, Katherine McCabe & Meredith Sadin
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2015, Pages 53-90
Abstract:
In this paper, we examine the role of political ideology in shaping black voters’ evaluations of political candidates’ race and skin tone. Our findings challenge simplistic notions of black preference for descriptive representation. Instead, we argue that race matters to how black Americans evaluate candidates for political office, but that it does so in combination with both candidates’ skin tone and voters’ ideology. Specifically, our data from a set of randomized experiments show that black conservative Democrats, relative to their more liberal copartisans, express a stronger preference for black candidates relative to white counterparts and prefer darker-skinned candidates relative to lighter-skinned ones. In exploring this result, we argue that conservative black Democrats, who are liberal economically but more socially conservative, use skin tone as a heuristic to help determine which candidate is most likely to match their party-atypical but race-typical political preferences. Thus, despite being less likely to support affirmative action policies, black conservatives are actually more prone to using race and skin tone heuristics in their evaluations of candidates for political office. These findings are substantively significant. As black voters have become much more ideologically diverse, their preferences with respect to candidate race and skin tone may have greater electoral consequences.
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Lance Hannon
Social Currents, March 2015, Pages 13-21
Abstract:
Perhaps reflecting a desire to emphasize the enduring power of rigidly constructed racial categories, sociology has tended to downplay the importance of within-category variation in skin tone. Similarly, in popular media, “colorism,” or discrimination based on skin lightness, is rarely mentioned. When colorism is discussed, it is almost exclusively framed in terms of intraracial “black-on-black” discrimination. In line with arguments highlighting the centrality of white racism, the present paper contends that it is important for researchers to give unique attention to white colorism. Using data from the 2012 American National Election Study, an example is presented on white interviewers’ perceptions of minority respondent skin tone and intelligence (N = 223). Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses indicate that African American and Latino respondents with the lightest skin are several times more likely to be seen by whites as intelligent compared with those with the darkest skin. The article concludes that a full accounting of white hegemony requires an acknowledgment of both white racism and white colorism.
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Daniel Effron & Eric Knowles
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, February 2015, Pages 234-253
Abstract:
We propose that people treat prejudice as more legitimate when it seems rationalistic — that is, linked to a group’s pursuit of collective interests. Groups that appear to be coherent and unified wholes (entitative groups) are most likely to have such interests. We thus predicted that belonging to an entitative group licenses people to express prejudice against outgroups. Support for this idea came from 3 correlational studies and 5 experiments examining racial, national, and religious prejudice. The first 4 studies found that prejudice and discrimination seemed more socially acceptable to third parties when committed by members of highly entitative groups, because people could more easily explain entitative groups’ biases as a defense of collective interests. Moreover, ingroup entitativity only lent legitimacy to outgroup prejudice when an interests-based explanation was plausible — namely, when the outgroup could possibly threaten the ingroup’s interests. The last 4 studies found that people were more willing to express private prejudices when they perceived themselves as belonging to an entitative group. Participants’ perceptions of their own race’s entitativity were associated with a greater tendency to give explicit voice to their implicit prejudice against other races. Furthermore, experimentally raising participants’ perceptions of ingroup entitativity increased explicit expressions of outgroup prejudice, particularly among people most likely to privately harbor such prejudices (i.e., highly identified group members). Together, these findings demonstrate that entitativity can lend a veneer of legitimacy to prejudice and disinhibit its expression. We discuss implications for intergroup relations and shifting national demographics.
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Germs and the out-group: Chronic and situational disease concerns affect intergroup categorization
Anastasia Makhanova, Saul Miller & Jon Maner
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, January 2015, Pages 8-19
Abstract:
Throughout human evolutionary history, members of unfamiliar out-groups are likely to have posed significant disease threats. The current studies assessed whether concerns about disease would bias people toward categorizing social targets as members of an unfamiliar out-group. Using a minimal group paradigm, 2 experiments assessed the extent to which perceivers categorized neutral targets and those displaying heuristic disease cues as members of the in-group versus the out-group. A bias toward categorizing targets with heuristic disease cues (but not neutral targets) as members of the novel out-group was observed among people high in chronic germ aversion and among those for whom disease threat had been experimentally primed. Consistent with theories emphasizing the pernicious dangers potentially posed by out-group pathogens, this bias was strongest if the targets were also a part of a racial out-group. Findings suggest a fundamental link between disease avoidance processes and biases in intergroup cognition.
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The impact of men's magazines on adolescent boys' objectification and courtship beliefs
Monique Ward, Laura Vandenbosch & Steven Eggermont
Journal of Adolescence, February 2015, Pages 49–58
Abstract:
Although much attention concerning the potential impact of sexualized media has focused on girls and women, less is known about how this content effects boys' perceptions of women and courtship. Accordingly, the current three-wave panel study investigated whether exposure to sexualizing magazines predicts adolescent boys' (N = 592) sexually objectifying notions of women and their beliefs about feminine courtship strategies. The results indicated that when boys consumed sexualizing magazines more often, they expressed more gender-stereotypical beliefs about feminine courtship strategies over time. This association was mediated by boys' objectification of women. The possibility of a reciprocal relation whereby beliefs about courtship strategies predict future consumption of sexualizing magazines was also explored but received no support. Discussion focuses on effects of sexualizing media on boys, and supports future research to build on multidisciplinary knowledge.
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Johanna van Oosten, Jochen Peter & Patti Valkenburg
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on how sexual music videos affect beliefs related to sexual aggression is rare and has not differentiated between the effects of music videos by male and female artists. Moreover, little is known about the affective processes that underlie the effects of sexual music videos. Using data from a nationally representative three-wave panel survey among 1,204 Dutch adolescents, structural equation modeling showed that viewing sexual music videos by male artists increased the acceptance of female token resistance (i.e., the notion that women say “no” to sex when they actually mean “yes”) among adolescent girls, but not adolescent boys. Furthermore, viewing sexual music videos by male artists influenced girls’ acceptance of token resistance indirectly via affective engagement. The findings suggest that effects of sexual music videos on stereotypical sexual beliefs depend on the specific type of music video and viewers’ gender, and can be partly explained by viewers’ affective engagement.
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Stereotypic vision: How stereotypes disambiguate visual stimuli
Joshua Correll et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, February 2015, Pages 219-233
Abstract:
Three studies examined how participants use race to disambiguate visual stimuli. Participants performed a first-person-shooter task in which Black and White targets appeared holding either a gun or an innocuous object (e.g., a wallet). In Study 1, diffusion analysis (Ratcliff, 1978) showed that participants rapidly acquired information about a gun when it appeared in the hands of a Black target, and about an innocuous object in the hands of a White target. For counterstereotypic pairings (armed Whites, unarmed Blacks), participants acquired information more slowly. In Study 2, eye tracking showed that participants relied on more ambiguous information (measured by visual angle from fovea) when responding to stereotypic targets; for counterstereotypic targets, they achieved greater clarity before responding. In Study 3, participants were briefly exposed to targets (limiting access to visual information) but had unlimited time to respond. In spite of their slow, deliberative responses, they showed racial bias. This pattern is inconsistent with control failure and suggests that stereotypes influenced identification of the object. All 3 studies show that race affects visual processing by supplementing objective information.
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Genetic counselors’ implicit racial attitudes and their relationship to communication
Kendra Schaa et al.
Health Psychology, February 2015, Pages 111-119
Objective: Implicit racial attitudes are thought to shape interpersonal interactions and may contribute to health-care disparities. This study explored the relationship between genetic counselors’ implicit racial attitudes and their communication during simulated genetic counseling sessions.
Method: A nationally representative sample of genetic counselors completed a web-based survey that included the Race Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Cooper et al., 2012). A subset of these counselors (n = 67) had participated in an earlier study in which they were video recorded counseling Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White SCs about their prenatal or cancer risks. The counselors’ IAT scores were related to their session communications through robust regression modeling.
Results: Genetic counselors showed a moderate to strong pro-White bias on the Race IAT (M = 0.41, SD = 0.35). Counselors with stronger pro-White bias were rated as displaying lower levels of positive affect (p < .05) and tended to use less emotionally responsive communication (p < .10) when counseling minority SCs. When counseling White SCs, pro-White bias was associated with lower levels of verbal dominance during sessions (p < .10). Stronger pro-White bias was also associated with more positive ratings of counselors’ nonverbal effectiveness by White SCs.
Conclusion: Implicit racial bias is associated with negative markers of communication in minority client sessions and may contribute to racial disparities in processes of care related to genetic services.
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Tweeting about sexism: The well-being benefits of a social media collective action
Mindi Foster
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although collective action has psychological benefits in non-gendered contexts (Drury et al., 2005, Br. J. Soc. Psychol., 44, 309), the benefits for women taking action against gender discrimination are unclear. This study examined how a popular, yet unexplored potential form of collective action, namely tweeting about sexism, affects women's well-being. Women read about sexism and were randomly assigned to tweet to one of three control groups. Content analyses showed tweets exhibited collective intent and action. Analyses of linguistic markers suggested public tweeters used more cognitive complexity in their language than private tweeters. Profile analyses showed that compared to controls, only public tweeters showed decreasing negative affect and increasing psychological well-being, suggesting tweeting about sexism may serve as a collective action that can enhance women's well-being.
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John Tawa et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of intergroup social distance have focused primarily on relations between dominant and minority groups, rather than between minority groups. In this study, various dimensions of resource competition relevant to group threat theory were contrasted. Black (n = 39), Asian (n = 53), and White (n = 118) participants developed self-resembling avatars and interacted in a virtual world in which various types of resource competition contexts were simulated. Avatars’ movements were tracked and dynamic social distances between each participant dyad and between each participant and each racial group as a whole (Black, Asian, and White) were computed. Growth curve analyses indicated that in the absence of resource competition, social distance between individuals and groups diminished over time. In contrast, resource competition tended to increase social distance between individuals and groups over time. In particular, merit-based resource competition increased Black participants’ social distance to Asians relative to White participants’ social distance to Asians. Findings are discussed in relation to the context of historical dissention between Blacks and Asians, and implications for the promotion of positive race relations.
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Claudia Simão & Markus Brauer
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research suggests that inducing fixed (rather than malleable) beliefs about groups leads to more negative attitudes toward out-groups. The present paper identifies the underlying mechanism of this effect. We show that individuals with a fixed belief about groups tend to construe intergroup settings as threatening situations that might reveal shortcomings of their in-group (perceived threat). In the present research, we measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Study 2) participants' lay theories about group malleability. We found that the extent to which individuals had an entity (versus an incremental) group theory influenced the level of threat they felt when interacting with out-group members, and that perceived threat in turn affected their level of ethnocentrism and prejudice. These findings shed new light on the role of lay theories in intergroup attitudes and suggest new ways to reduce prejudice.
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Jake Harwood et al.
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine predictors of outgroup partner “fit” (the extent to which an individual is seen as representative of a group), and whether fit determines generalization from a discrete intergroup communication experience to intentions for future contact with the outgroup. In an experiment, 288 undergraduate students imagined a conversation with an older target who was presented either positively or negatively. The positively valenced older adult was seen as being more representative of older people in general (high fit), and this link was stronger for those with more past positive and fewer past negative communication experiences. Fit moderated the effects of imagined interaction valence on intentions for future intergroup contact. A positive older partner perceived as fitting the category “older people” resulted in greater intention to communicate with older people in the future than a negative partner; individuals who saw their partner as atypical showed the reverse pattern — they were less likely to report intentions for future intergenerational contact after a positive than a negative manipulated interaction. The findings demonstrate that negative intergroup communication can at times have positive effects, and positive contact can have negative effects.
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Chenbo Wang et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans show stronger empathy for in-group compared to out-group members' suffering and help in-group members more than out-group members. Moreover, the in-group bias in empathy and parochial altruism tend to be more salient in collectivistic than individualistic cultures. The current work tested the hypothesis that modifying self-construals, which differentiate between collectivistic and individualistic cultural orientations, affects in-group bias in empathy for perceived own-race versus other-race pain. By scanning adults using functional MRI, we found stronger neural activities in the mid-cingulate, left insula and supplementary motor area in response to racial in-group compared to out-group members' pain after participants had been primed with interdependent self-construals. However, the racial in-group bias in neural responses to others' pain in the left SMA, MCC and insula was significantly reduced by priming independent self-construals. Our findings suggest that shifting an individual's self-construal leads to changes of his/her racial in-group bias in neural responses to others' suffering.
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Brain Reward Activity to Masked In-Group Smiling Faces Predicts Friendship Development
Pin-Hao Chen et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined whether neural responses in the ventral striatum (VS) to in-group facial expressions — presented without explicit awareness — could predict friendship patterns in newly arrived individuals from China 6 months later. Individuals who initially showed greater VS activity in response to in-group happy expressions during functional neuroimaging later made considerably more in-group friends, suggesting that VS activity might reflect reward processes that drive in-group approach behaviors.
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Accentuating the Negative: Candidate Race and Campaign Strategy
Yanna Krupnikov & Spencer Piston
Political Communication, Winter 2015, Pages 152-173
Abstract:
This article examines the impact of candidate race and campaign negativity on candidate evaluations and turnout. Unlike previous research, we argue that candidate race and campaign negativity should be considered simultaneously. In order to test this argument, we conduct a survey experiment of a nationally representative sample of White adults and a replication study. While we find, consistent with previous research, that respondents unfavorably evaluate candidates who decide to sponsor a negative ad, there are two important exceptions to this pattern: When the ad sponsor is Black, among White respondents who view Blacks negatively, the penalty for going negative is disproportionately large, while among White respondents who view Blacks positively, the penalty for going negative is disproportionately small. More generally, our findings suggest that the effects of candidate attributes and campaign strategy on voter behavior should not be considered in isolation, as they are mutually reinforcing.
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Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore
Huailu Li, Kevin Lang & Kaiwen Leong
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
The street sex worker market in Geylang, Singapore is highly competitive. Clients can search legally at negligible cost. Sex workers discriminate based on client ethnicity despite an excess supply of sex workers. Workers are more (less) likely to approach and ask a higher (lower) price of Caucasians (Bangladeshis), based on their perceived willingness to pay. They avoid Indians, set a significantly higher price and are less likely to reach an agreement with them, suggesting that Indians face taste discrimination. These findings remain even after controlling for prostitute fixed effects and are consistent with the workers' self-reported attitudes and beliefs.
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When does it hurt? Intergroup permeability moderates the link between discrimination and self-esteem
David Bourguignon et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that personal discrimination and group discrimination have distinct effects on personal self-esteem. Specifically, whereas personal discrimination negatively impacts self-esteem, group discrimination increases it. We suggest that this pattern is dependent on the socio-structural context in which individuals experience discrimination. To test this hypothesis, we manipulate intergroup permeability and examine its impact on the link between personal/group discrimination and personal self-esteem. Results show that a control condition replicates previous research, that is, a positive association between group discrimination and self-esteem and a negative association for personal discrimination. The positive association of group discrimination disappeared in a permeable context and reversed when the context was presented as impermeable. Moreover, the deleterious effect of personal discrimination on self-esteem vanished in impermeable contexts. Results are discussed in light of the literature on stigmatization.
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Sexist Humor in Facebook Profiles: Perceptions of Humor Targeting Women and Men
Megan Strain, Donald Saucier & Amanda Martens
Humor, February 2015, Pages 119–141
Abstract:
Despite advances in women’s equality, and perhaps as a result of it, sexist humor is prevalent in society. Research on this topic has lacked realism in the way the humor is conveyed to participants, and has not examined perceptions of both men and women who use sexist humor. We embedded jokes in printed Facebook profiles to present sexist humor to participants. We manipulated the gender of the individual in the profile (man or woman), and the type of joke presented (anti-men, anti-women, neutral) in a 2×3 between-groups design. We found that both men and women rated anti-women jokes as more sexist than neutral humor, and women also rated anti-men jokes as sexist. We also found that men who displayed anti-women humor were perceived less positively than men displaying anti-men humor, or women displaying either type of humor. These findings suggest that there may be different gender norms in place for joke tellers regarding who is an acceptable target of sexist humor.