The talk explores strategies used by members of dominant groups (e.g. Whites) to maintain the hierarchy, with a particular focus on Whites’ preferences for political leaders. The focus will be on strategies that appear to favor disadvantaged groups (e.g. ethic minorities), but in fact are intended to serve the long-term interests of the dominant group. The discussion will use the ideas described to provide an explanation for the recent political election.

The willingness of people to sacrifice their lives for their group has defied explanation for centuries. I suggest that identity fusion–a visceral sense of “oneness” with a group–may help understand such phenomena. In contrast to past approaches to group behavior, the identity fusion formulation emphasizes the role of the personal self and intragroup relationships in extreme pro-group action. Feelings of personal agency, perceptions of family-like ties to other group members, and a sense of group-related invulnerability mediate the link between identity fusion and pro-group behaviors.

Ethnic-racial identity is an important developmental concern with implications for psychological and academic adjustment. There is ample evidence that race and ethnicity shape youths’ daily experiences in school. Such experiences should be understood within the broader social-emotional context of schooling–the conditions for which adults are ultimately responsible. Are peer interactions around race couched in a conflicted, alienating, and inequitable space? Or one that is harmonious, emotionally-supportive, and equitable? We know surprisingly little about how social-emotional characteristics of teacher and peer interactions may inform changes in ethnic-racial identity. In this talk, I will present recent research from my lab that illuminates some of the ways in which the ethnic-racial identity of diverse youth is embedded in a school’s social-emotional context.

Intergroup contact stands as one of the most widely studied approaches to reducing prejudice. Yet contact research has also been criticized for focusing too narrowly on the goal of prejudice reduction. This talk will review basic effects of intergroup contact, key processes underlying its effects, and how contact may impact relations between groups far beyond its effects on prejudice reduction.

Although social psychologists have been studying intergroup biases for almost a century, there is still much to understand about the causes, consequences, and processes related to categorizing people into distinct social groups. Based in part on multidisciplinary work in this area, new methodologies and ways of thinking about stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination abound. Consequently, knowledge about social categorization processes is advancing at a rapid pace. In this talk, I with describe some of the approaches taken by my laboratory to investigate intergroup biases. Specifically, I will present experiments from three distinct projects related to forecasted and actual responses to racism, strategies to reduce intergroup bias, and the role of visual attention in ingroup preference. This research utilizes a diverse set of social cognitive paradigms to explore the mechanisms driving more implicit categorization processes. Together these findings underline the importance of contextual manipulations and momentary motivations on a variety of discriminatory responses and suggest possible ways to improve intergroup relations.

The talk will discuss an initial program of research exploring the relationship between TV viewing and automatically activated racist attitudes. The talk will discuss how TV both perpetuates and can mitigate racist attitudes.

Women who study or work in male-dominated fields such as science can be targeted by or witness to subtle gender stereotyping, including having their contributions and ideas in science be questioned, discounted, or ignored by others. In this talk I present research examining the detrimental effects of simply witnessing the negative treatment of women in science settings among female science majors. Results of laboratory research showed that, compared to a control group, women in science majors who were exposed to this negative treatment of another woman showed patterns of attribution that support gender stereotypes. Engaging in this stereotypic attribution bias predicted a lower sense of belonging in science and diminished intentions to remain in science post-graduation. This research highlights the need to support science settings that are perceived as welcoming to women, in order to retain women in science fields.

We explore the conjecture that norms of racial rhetoric in U.S. campaigns have shifted over the last several years. Prior work suggests that the way politicians talk about race affects the power of racial attitudes in political judgments. Racial priming theory suggested that explicit racial rhetoric – messages overtly hostile toward minorities – would be rejected. Only when race is cued subtly would the power of racial attitudes be maximized. Replication attempts have failed. Our theory identifies two historically related shifts that lead us to expect the effective distinction between explicit and implicit racial rhetoric has declined in recent years. Four nationally representative survey experiments strongly support our predictions: Regardless of whether political messages are racially explicit or implicit, the power of racial attitudes is large and stable. We find that many citizens now recognize racially hostile content in campaign communications, but are no longer angered or disturbed by it.