What are the points of connection between structures and individuals when we think about bias? The Fall 2024 RCGD Seminar Series “The Social Psychology of Systemic Racism,” an all-star lineup of behavioral and political psychologists will define what, in their words, makes systemic racism systemic, and how extra-individual levels of analysis could be incorporated in social psychological theories and methods. 

The Fall 2024 series kicks off Aug. 26 with a brief series introduction and reception at ISR Thompson Room 1430. Join us!

Racial disparities in policing are profound and accompanied by equally persistent gaps in trust. Analyses of these and other inequities are often bifurcated between institutional and individual levels of analysis. In this talk, I describe how everyday contacts between the public and doctors, teachers, or police officers—institutional interactions—bridge these levels. Organizations direct and coordinate these agents’ individual discretion; at the same time, individual agents relate to the public in ways institutions themselves cannot. The dual nature of these encounters links individual and dyadic processes to organizational and institutional ones. Using police stops as a paradigmatic example, I illustrate how institutional interactions contribute to racial gaps in police‐community trust, how they can be used as a platform for changing the relationship between law enforcement and the public, and how they can inform our understanding of inequality in other settings. 

Recent work suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a minoritized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged foreignness or inferiority. Heightened solidarity is then supposed to boost support for policies that benefit minoritized outgroups who are not one’s own– for example, Black adults become more pro-Latino, Asian adults become more pro-Black, and Latino adults become more pro-Asian. In this talk, Efrén Pérez will discuss his lab’s growing experimental evidence on this proposed mechanism. He will highlight new challenges and opportunities to learn more—both theoretically and methodologically 0– about interminority solidarity in politics. He concludes by discussing new research agendas to advance our understanding about interminority politics in a multiethnic democracy like the United States.

Efrén Pérez is Full Professor of Political Science and Psychology at UCLA. His research centers on political psychology, with specific interests in intergroup politics, group identity, language and political thinking, implicit political cognition, and psychometrics. He has published more than thirty articles in leading general science, political science, and psychological science journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Political Behavior, and Political Psychology. He is also the author of four books, including Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (Chicago University Press) and Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion (Princeton University Press), which received the 2023 Robert E. Lane Best Book Award in Political Psychology from the American Political Science Association. In addition to his research, Efrén directs the Race, Ethnicity, Politics, and Society (REPS) Lab at UCLA.

How should we live in an increasingly diverse society? To what values, understandings and standards ought we hold ourselves accountable? Most answers to these questions focus on mitigating personal prejudice. Churn joins that call. But it identifies a more fundamental
challenge: the unstable trust that our history imposes on us and the churn it causes when we are in each other’s midst. It is a formidable challenge, but Churn sees a new path to making diversity work: trust-building. This approach is a more manageable way for our society to become the integrated, enabling society we need it to be. This hope, as I have stressed, is based on a simple fact: trust-building is a game played largely on the ground, in the immediate circumstances of our lives. It doesn’t depend on first changing individual hearts and minds. Rather, in the important settings of our lives–our schools, businesses, colleges, churches, etc.—it focuses on building the skills and conditions that enable trust. Churn offers a blueprint for how to do this: across the divides of difference, see full humanity and full potential; listen in a learning mindset; be prepared to give trust first; and then show up with concrete support that enables full participation. It’s a scalable blueprint. It can be hard work. But it’s not magic. And all of us can do it.

Implicit bias has expanded beyond academic research and, like cognitive dissonance and nudges, entered into the cultural mainstream. Politicians talk about it, journalists write about it, and corporations require their employees to be trained about it. At the same time, the measures and methods used to study implicit bias have come under increasing criticism. How can implicit bias be so prevalent and yet stand on such apparently shaky grounds? In this talk I describe a new theory that describes implicit bias not primarily as a feature of individual minds, but as a feature of social contexts. Akin to the “wisdom of crowds” effect, implicit bias may emerge as the aggregate effect of individual fluctuations in concept accessibility that are ephemeral and context-dependent. This Bias of Crowds theory treats implicit bias tests as measures of situations more than persons. Viewing implicit bias from this perspective resolves several puzzles in the existing literature, turns supposed methodological weaknesses into strengths, and generates new insights into how and why implicit bias propagates inequalities.

Keith Payne is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill. He studies the effects of inequality on human thought and behavior, and how psychological patterns create and reinforce racial and economic disparities. He is author of The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the way we Think, Live, and Die, and the forthcoming Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide.

In this talk, Michael Kraus will provide a broad overview of our research on the narrative of racial progress—the tendency for Americans to believe in the linear, automatic, and even natural march forward to racial equity and justice. The talk will begin with an overall orientation to Kraus’s research approach to inequality. From there, he will describe the theoretical background of this narrative, highlighting the psychological and structural drivers of the tendency to overestimate racial equality and progress toward achieving it. Along the way he will summarize the state of the evidence in support of racial progress beliefs. Having provided this summary, he will conclude by discussing some of our emerging efforts to promote more realistic conceptions of racial inequality, and how narratives of racial progress act as barriers to the actual achievement of racial equity.

Psychologist Michael W. Kraus studies how inequality fundamentally shapes the dynamics of human social interactions. His current research explores the behaviors and emotional states that maintain and perpetuate economic and racial inequality in society.

Stacey Sinclair will describe a program of research that examines the ironic nature of efforts to support racial diversity in American universities. American universities are more apt to embrace racial diversity because it serves institutional goals, such as enhancement of group learning and corresponding cognitive skills (i.e., institutional rationales), rather than because it manifests institutional values, such as fairness (i.e., moral rationales). Our research suggests that instrumental rationales do not reflect the preferences of those they are purported to serve, low-status racial minorities. Rather, they comport with the preferences of White Americans, especially political conservatives. Further, embracing instrumental rationales in the absence of moral rationales is associated with negative outcomes for low-status racial minorities.

The mere presence of anti-racism efforts has the powerful potential to mitigate social inequalities linked to historic and contemporary racism. However, the presence and promise of anti-racism efforts are threatened by (1) policies and practices that are performative and culturally detached from the lived realities of marginalized social groups (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities) and (2) zero-sum claims that portray initiatives aimed at reducing systemic racism as benefitting marginalized social groups at the expense of more dominant social groups. Harnessing cultural psychological insights, this talk explicitly addresses such threats. It provides empirical evidence that anti-racism efforts when driven by actionable change and imbued with meaningful cultural inclusion can yield dividends that are non-zero-sum— related to positive outcomes that are experienced among marginalized groups without costs to dominant groups. Across studies that leverage diverse methods, anti-racism is examined as behaviors, attitudes, and policies (e.g., Black Lives Matter marches, diversity curriculum practices). The talk highlights associations between anti-racism efforts and consequential life outcomes including social connectedness and polarization in social networks, physical and mental well-being, as well as intergenerational (infant) health and mortality. Holistically, the talk presents findings that demonstrate the potential for societal thriving as positive outcomes are observed across social groups (e.g., among marginalized and dominant groups). It centers marginalized groups and underscores the importance of intergroup approaches for intervention strategies that are optimally positioned to realize more equitable outcomes. Theory and applied implications for minimizing and combating backlash to anti-racism efforts (e.g., book bans, anti-diversity state policies) are discussed.

Tiffany N. Brannon received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology from Stanford University and her B.A. in Psychology from Florida International University. Her research examines socio-cultural identities in negatively stereotyped groups such as Latino/a/x and African Americans; and she investigates the potential for these identities to serve as psychological resources— strengths that can facilitate a variety of individual and intergroup benefits. Her research has been published in top academic journals including Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Psychological Science, American Psychologist, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Issues and Policy Review, and the Journal of Social Issues. She is a recipient of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’ (SPSSI) Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award and Michele Alexander Early Career Award for Scholarship and Service. She is also a recipient of the Early Career Psychologists Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association (APA) Committee on Early Career Psychologists (CECP).

She is the editor for the Diversity, Inequality & Culture section of Social and Personality Psychology Compass (SPPC) and an inaugural member of the Aspen Institute’s Research Advisory Group for Belonging, Meaning, Well-being and Purpose (BMWP).

The United States has long been, and continues to be, a highly segregated society. When societies separate groups of people in the ways that we do in the U.S., that separation has not only economic, political, and sociological consequences, it also affects how people think and communicate about social issues and interventions to address them. In this talk, Dr. Neil Lewis Jr. (he/him) will share recent findings from my program of research that has been using the United States as a context to examine how patterns of segregation and other forms of social stratification seep into the mind and affect how people perceive and make meaning of the world around them. He will also discuss the consequences of those meaning-making processes for people’s judgments, motivations, and decisions across multiple domains. He will conclude with implications of this research for social scientific theories, and the practical application of those theories.

Dr. Neil Lewis, Jr. (he/him) is a behavioral scientist who studies the motivational, behavioral, and equity implications of social interventions and policies. He is a Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medicine, where he is an associate professor in the department of communication, division of general internal medicine, school of public policy, and graduate field of psychology. He also co-founded and co-directs Cornell’s Action Research Collaborative, which brings together researchers, practitioners, community members, and policymakers to collaborate on projects and initiatives to address pressing issues in society. Lewis has received the SAGE Young Scholar Early Career Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, and the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Sentiment toward racialized violence, and protest against it (like Black Lives Matter), varies a great deal over time, place, and people. Colin Leach (he/they) will discuss a transdisciplinary project that uses micro (behavioral experiments, psychophysiology) and macro (news and social media) empirical approaches to trace the psychological and social dynamics of this sentiment in the U.S.

Colin Wayne Leach (B.A. 1989, M.A. 1991, Boston University; Ph.D. 1995, University of Michigan) is a social and personality psychologist who studies status and morality in identity, emotion, and motivation. He is also interested in protest & resistance; Prejudice, stereotypes, …isms; Meta-theory, methods, and statistics; and transdisciplinary approaches.