Atypical
David Ciuk
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on American core political values, partisanship, and ideology often concludes that liberals and Democrats believe equality to be one of the most important values while conservatives and Republicans place greater emphasis on social order and moral traditionalism. Though these findings are valuable, it is assumed that they generalize across various groups (e.g. socioeconomic classes, religious groups, racial groups, etc.) in society. Focusing on racial groups in contemporary American politics, I challenge this assumption. More specifically, I argue that if individuals’ value preferences are formed during their pre-adult socialization years, and if the socialization process is different across racial groups, then it may be the case that members of different racial groups connect their value preferences to important political behaviors, including partisanship and ideology, in different ways as well. In the first part of this study, I fit a geometric model of value preferences to two different data sets — the first from 2010 and the second from 2002 — and I show that although there is substantial value disagreement between white Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives, that disagreement is smaller in Latinos and almost completely absent in African Americans. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate the political implications of these findings by estimating the effects of values on party and ideology, conditional on race. Results show that where whites’ value preferences affect their partisan and ideological group ties, the effects are smaller in Latinos and indistinguishable from zero in African Americans. I close by suggesting that scholars of values and political behavior ought to think in a more nuanced manner about how fundamental political cognitions relate to various attitudes and behaviors across different groups in society.
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Brian Donovan
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, forthcoming
Abstract:
For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes adolescents to develop genetic beliefs about racial difference, thereby affecting prejudice. Individual students (N = 135, grades 7–9) were randomly assigned within their classrooms to learn either from: (i) four text-based lessons discussing racial differences in skeletal structure and the prevalence of genetic disease (racial condition); or (ii) an identical curriculum lacking racial terminology (nonracial condition). Over 3-months that coincided with this learning, students in the racial condition grew significantly more in their perception of the amount of genetic variation between races relative to students in the nonracial condition. Furthermore, those in the racial condition grew in their belief that races differ in intelligence for genetic reasons significantly more than those in the nonracial condition. And, compared to the nonracial condition, students in the racial condition became significantly less interested in socializing across racial lines and less supportive of policies that reduce racial inequality in education. These findings show how biology education sustains racial inequality, and conversely, how human genetic variation education could be designed to reduce genetically based racism.
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Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: Experimentally Reducing Racist Harassment
Kevin Munger
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
I conduct an experiment which examines the impact of group norm promotion and social sanctioning on racist online harassment. Racist online harassment de-mobilizes the minorities it targets, and the open, unopposed expression of racism in a public forum can legitimize racist viewpoints and prime ethnocentrism. I employ an intervention designed to reduce the use of anti-black racist slurs by white men on Twitter. I collect a sample of Twitter users who have harassed other users and use accounts I control (“bots”) to sanction the harassers. By varying the identity of the bots between in-group (white man) and out-group (black man) and by varying the number of Twitter followers each bot has, I find that subjects who were sanctioned by a high-follower white male significantly reduced their use of a racist slur. This paper extends findings from lab experiments to a naturalistic setting using an objective, behavioral outcome measure and a continuous 2-month data collection period. This represents an advance in the study of prejudiced behavior.
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A comparison of race-related pain stereotypes held by White and Black individuals
Nicole Hollingshead et al.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Pain judgments are the basis for pain management. The purpose of this study was to assess Black and White participants' race-related pain stereotypes. Undergraduates (n = 551) rated the pain sensitivity and willingness to report pain for the typical Black person, White person, and themselves. Participants, regardless of race, rated the typical White person as being more pain sensitive and more willing to report pain than the typical Black person. White participants rated themselves as less sensitive and less willing to report pain than same-race peers; however, Black participants rated themselves as more pain sensitive and more willing to report pain than same-race peers. These findings highlight similarities and differences in racial stereotypic pain beliefs held by Black and White individuals.
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Ethnic Cueing Across Minorities a Survey Experiment on Candidate Evaluation in the United States
Claire Adida, Lauren Davenport & Gwyneth McClendon
Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 2016, Pages 815-836
Abstract:
The number of minority voters in the United States continues to rise, and politicians must increasingly appeal to a diverse electorate. Are ethnic cues effective with different groups of minority voters? In this article, we investigate this question across the two largest minority groups in the United States: Blacks and Latinos. Drawing on American politics research, we propose that Black respondents will react positively to coethnic and cominority cues, while Latinos will be less receptive to such cues, and that this difference will be due at least in part to varying perceptions of discrimination across the two groups. We test this argument with an experimental design that leverages Congressman Charles Rangel’s mixed heritage as Black and Latino. Our results confirm that Black participants respond positively to both coethnic and cominority cues about Rangel, while Latino participants do not. Reactions to ethnic cues in turn correspond to differences in perceptions of discrimination.
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Hearing in Color: How Expectations Distort Perception of Skin Tone
Ulrik Lyngs et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has found that the perceived brightness of a face can be distorted by the social category of race. Thus, Levin and Banaji (2006) found, in a U.S. sample, that faces of identical brightness were perceived to be lighter if they had stereotypical White American features than if they had Black American features. Here, we present 2 experiments conducted in Natal, Brazil, that extend this line of research. Experiment 1 tested if the brightness distortion effect would generalize to a Brazilian population. Experiment 2 tested if speech accent would have a similar effect on brightness perception. In Experiment 1, we found that the brightness distortion effect clearly replicated in the Brazilian sample: Faces with Black racial features were perceived to be darker than faces with White racial features, even though their objective brightness was identical. In Experiment 2, we found that speech accent influenced brightness perception in a similar manner: Faces were perceived to be darker when paired with an accent associated with low socioeconomic status than when they were paired with an accent associated with high socioeconomic status. Whereas racial concepts in Brazil are often claimed to be much more fluid compared with the United States, our findings suggest that the populations are quite similar with respect to associations between facial features and skin tone. Our findings also demonstrate speech accent as an additional source of category information that perceptual cognition can take into account when modeling the world.
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Positivity Bias in Judging Ingroup Members’ Emotional Expressions
Talya Lazerus et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated how group membership impacts valence judgments of ingroup and outgroup members’ emotional expressions. In Experiment 1, participants, randomized into 2 novel, competitive groups, rated the valence of in- and outgroup members’ facial expressions (e.g., fearful, happy, neutral) using a circumplex affect grid. Across all emotions, participants judged ingroup members’ expressions as more positive than outgroup members’ expressions. In Experiment 2, participants categorized fearful and happy expressions as being either positive or negative using a mouse-tracking paradigm. Participants exhibited the most direct trajectories toward the “positive” label for ingroup happy expressions and an initial attraction toward positive for ingroup expressions of fear, with outgroup emotion trajectories falling in between. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 and demonstrated that the effect could not be accounted for by targets’ gaze direction. Overall, people judged ingroup faces as more positive, regardless of emotion, both in deliberate and implicit judgments.
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Cultural Sentiments and Schema-Consistency Bias in Information Transmission
Fallin Hunzaker
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The negative outcomes associated with cultural stereotypes based on race, class, and gender and related schema-consistency biases are well documented. How these biases become culturally entrenched is less well understood. In particular, previous research has neglected the role of information transmission processes in perpetuating cultural biases. In this study, I combine insights from the cultural cognition, affect control theory, and cultural transmission frameworks to examine how one form of internalized culture — fundamental cultural sentiments — affects the content of information shared in communication. I argue that individuals communicate narratives in ways that minimize deflection of internalized cultural sentiments, resulting in cultural-consistency bias. I test this proposition using a serial transmission study in which participants read and retell short stories. Results show that culturally inconsistent, high-deflection information experiences an initial boost in memorability, but consistency biases ultimately win out as information is altered to increase cultural consistency, demonstrating that deflection provides a promising measure of cultural schema-consistency. This measure is predictive of the information that individuals share in communication and changes to this information in the transmission process.
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Bradley Bond
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, June 2016, Pages 91-97
Abstract:
The present study, grounded in gender schema theory, employed a posttest experimental design to examine how television might influence girls’ perceptions of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Girls (6-9 years old) were either exposed to stereotypical or counter-stereotypical STEM female television characters. In a posttest following exposure, girls reported math and science self-efficacy, preference for STEM and stereotypical careers, and perceptions of scientists’ gender using the draw-a-scientist procedure. Girls in the stereotype condition reported more interest in stereotypical careers and were more likely to perceive scientists as males than girls in the counter-stereotype STEM condition or a no exposure control. Girls in the counter-stereotype STEM condition did not differ from the no exposure control in any of the dependent variables. Results suggest that onetime exposure to televised stereotypes may activate existing gender schema, but that onetime exposure to televised counter-stereotypes may not have the capacity to alter girls’ STEM schema.
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Evava Pietri, John Dovidio & Russell Fazio
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
We utilized a general intervention that affects (through “recalibration”) the way people generalize negative associations when evaluating objects to promote less negative expectations about an interaction with a Black Internet “chat” partner. During this intervention, participants played a game to learn which “beans” varying in shape and speckles increased or decreased their points. Participants later classified game beans and new beans as good or bad. Recalibration condition participants were told whether they classified beans correctly, thus receiving feedback regarding the appropriate weighting of resemblance to a known positive versus negative object. Control participants, who received no feedback, were more likely to classify new beans as negative than recalibration participants. Compared to control, the recalibration condition also anticipated feeling less intergroup anxiety during a chat with a Black partner (Experiments 1 and 2) and this effect was strongest among participants who reported fewer close interactions with Black people (Experiment 2).
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Experiencing Racial Humor with Outgroups: A Psychophysiological Examination of Co-Viewing Effects
Omotayo Banjo et al.
Media Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on co-viewing (or group viewing) is scarce. Yet, co-viewing has important implications for the viewers’ entertainment experience and the way viewers respond to and evaluate entertainment — especially those with controversial messages. The present study investigated responses to racial humor content among racial in-group and out-group viewing contexts. Specifically, the study examined the extent to which Blacks and Whites would experience discomfort when viewing racial slurs in comedies with in-group compared to out-group members. Employing real-time psychophysiological data and multilevel time series models, the study found a significant increase in emotional arousal (indicated by SCRs) and distraction (indicated by RSA) among Blacks in the context of out-group viewing compared to in-group viewing, but not for Whites. Implications of findings are discussed.
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Corey Cook et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that people chronically concerned with safety, as measured by the Belief in a Dangerous World (BDW) Scale, are prone to intergroup prejudice and likely to endorse negative stereotypes under conditions eliciting concern for safety. Using a sociofunctional, threat-based approach to prejudice, the current research tested whether people with high BDW report increased prejudice specifically toward groups stereotypically associated with safety-related threats compared to groups associated with unrelated threats. Studies 1 and 2 found that higher BDW predicts increased negativity, safety-related concern, and fear toward groups stereotypically associated with threats to safety (e.g., illegal immigrants and Muslims) compared to groups thought to pose unrelated threats (e.g., gay men and obese people). Study 3 activated concern for safety using a news story detailing increased crime (vs. a control story), finding an interaction between safety concern activation, target group, and BDW, such that situational threat concern elicited greater prejudice toward Mexican Americans, but not toward Asian Americans, from those participants with higher BDW. These studies suggest that individual differences in concern for safety predict specific prejudices (e.g., fear and social distancing) toward distinct groups rather than general outgroup negativity.