Examining how a documentary film can serve as an intervention to shift attitudes and behaviours around sexism in STEM.

"Picture a Scientist," a documentary featuring stories and research about bias in STEM, reached a large international audience. Yet, the extent to which this type of engaging media can impact gender bias remains unclear. In a unique collaboration between film creators and researchers, the current large-scale field studies explored whether "Picture a Scientist" functioned as an intervention and persuasive message targeting sexism in STEM.

Signaling safety and fostering fairness: Exploring the psychological processes underlying (in)congruent cues among Black women.

Exposure to an organizational diversity cue may help attract Black women to professional spaces. The cue transfer framework contends that because intergroup attitudes co-occur, both cues congruent or incongruent with one's minoritized identity signal an environment that welcomes all minoritized persons. Critically, the utility of such cues had yet to be explored among Black women.

Reducing anti-fat bias toward the self and others: a randomized controlled trial.

Despite strong evidence linking anti-fat bias directed toward others with markers of self-directed anti-fat bias, there is a dearth of theory-based research examining the cognitive pathways underlying this relationship, and existing bias-reduction intervention efforts have thus far been conducted with exclusive focus on one domain or the other. Cognitive dissonance (CD)-based interventions have been identified as viable for reducing anti-fat bias directed toward the self and others. However, no study has yet examined whether the effects of these domain-specific interventions (e.

Gender bias in teaching evaluations: the causal role of department gender composition.

Women are underrepresented in academia's higher ranks. Promotion oftentimes requires positive student-provided course evaluations. At a U.

The relationship between racial discrimination and substance use: Does locus of control help explain risk?

Introduction: Exposure to racial discrimination has been consistently linked with risk for substance use. However, outside of externalizing and affect-based factors, few other mechanisms have been examined. One potential candidate is locus of control, a learning processes that involves the degree to which one attributes rewards as resulting from their own control (internal locus of control) versus outside control (external locus of control).

Black (patients') lives matter: Exploring the role of identity-safety cues in healthcare settings among Black Americans.

Two online experiments investigated whether hypothetical physicians' use of an identity-safety cue acknowledging systemic injustice (a Black Lives Matter pin) improves Black Americans' evaluations of the physician and feelings of identity-safety. Across studies, findings showed that when a White physician employed the identity-safety cue, Black Americans reported stronger perceptions of physician allyship and increased identity-safety (e.g.

Does the future look bright? Processing style determines the impact of valence weighting biases and self-beliefs on expectations.

People regularly form expectations about their future, and whether those expectations are positive or negative can have important consequences. So, what determines the valence of people's expectations? Research seeking to answer this question by using an individual-differences approach has established that trait biases in optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs and, more recently, trait biases in behavioral tendencies to weight one's past positive versus negative experiences more heavily each predict the valence of people's typical expectations. However, these two biases do not correlate, suggesting limits on a purely individual-differences approach to predicting people's expectations.

Reducing STEM gender bias with VIDS (video interventions for diversity in STEM).

Gender biases contribute to the underrepresentation of women in STEM. In response, the scientific community has called for methods to reduce bias, but few validated interventions exist. Thus, an interdisciplinary group of researchers and filmmakers partnered to create VIDS (Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM), which are short videos that expose participants to empirical findings from published gender bias research in 1 of 3 conditions.

Increased Preclass Preparation Underlies Student Outcome Improvement in the Flipped Classroom.

Active-learning environments such as those found in a flipped classroom are known to increase student performance, although how these gains are realized over the course of a semester is less well understood. In an upper-level lecture course designed primarily for biochemistry majors, we examine how students attain improved learning outcomes, as measured by exam scores, when the course is converted to a more active flipped format. The context is a physical chemistry course catering to life science majors in which approximately half of the lecture material is placed online and in-class problem-solving activities are increased, while total class time is reduced.

Weighting positive versus negative: the fundamental nature of valence asymmetry.

Objective: The relation between weighting of valence information in attitude generalization and evaluation of novel/hypothetical situations was explored.

Method: Undergraduate participants played a computer game requiring them to learn which stimuli (beans) would increase/decrease their points. Later, participants classified the valence of game beans and novel ones varying in resemblance to game beans.