Finding your roots: Do DNA ancestry tests increase racial (in)tolerance?

While it is often assumed that Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) ancestry results illuminate one's true racial or ethnic lineage, the consequence of this inference remains largely unknown. This leaves two conflictual hypotheses largely untested: Do DNA ancestry tests increase racial tolerance or, alternatively, racial intolerance? Two multiwave experiments aimed to test these hypotheses using either real or bogus DNA ancestry results in combination with random assignment and a tightly controlled repeated-measurements experimental design. Bayesian and inferential analyses on both general and student populations of majority-group members in the United States (i.

Negotiating power: agenda ordering and the willingness to negotiate in asymmetric intergroup conflicts.

In this research, we investigated how group power influences the way members of groups in asymmetrical conflict approach intergroup negotiations. Drawing on theories of negotiations and of intergroup power, we predicted that group power would interact with features of the proposed negotiating agenda to influence willingness to come to the table. Based on the negotiation literature, we focused on 2 types of sequential negotiation agendas: 1 beginning with the discussion of consequential issues before less consequential issues (consequential first) and 1 leaving the discussion of consequential issues until after less consequential issues are discussed (consequential later).

Racial identity and depression among African American women.

This study examines direct, interactive, and indirect effects of racial identity and depression in a sample of 379 African American women. Results indicated that higher racial private and public regard were associated with lower depression. The relationship between private regard and depression was moderated by racial centrality, such that higher private regard was more strongly related to lower depression when women's race was a central part of their self-concept.

Fear extinction to an out-group face: the role of target gender.

Conditioning studies on humans and other primates show that fear responses acquired toward danger-relevant stimuli, such as snakes, resist extinction, whereas responses toward danger-irrelevant stimuli, such as birds, are more readily extinguished. Similar evolved biases may extend to human groups, as recent research demonstrates that a conditioned fear response to faces of persons of a social out-group resists extinction, whereas fear toward a social in-group is more readily extinguished. Here, we provide an important extension to previous work by demonstrating that this fear-extinction bias occurs solely when the exemplars are male.