Anti-bias interventions do not always have the intended results and can even backfire. In light of research on the psychology of morality, we examined whether confronting people with evidence of their own (group's) bias causes a (psychophysiological) threat response, and how to overcome this. We focused on an intervention addressing gender bias in teacher evaluations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Opin Psychol
December 2024
LGBTQ + people continue to face bias and discrimination in the workplace. In this article, we focus on one subtle yet insidious manifestation of such bias: heteroprofessionalism. In workplace contexts, professionalism is generally encouraged.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: With a concealable stigmatized identity, sexual minorities not only face discrimination but the burden of deciding when to be open about their sexuality. What are the mental health costs and benefits to openness about sexual minority status? On the one hand, openness fosters integration within the LGBTQ + community (yielding downstream benefits), but it also heightens perceptions of discrimination towards oneself and the group at large (yielding downstream costs for mental health).
Objective: Previous research has focused on openness as reflecting either a cost or a benefit to sexual minorities' mental health, resulting in apparent conflict.
The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries ( = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated how the perception of being dissimilar to others at work relates to employees' felt inclusion, distinguishing between surface-level and deep-level dissimilarity. In addition, we tested the indirect relationships between surface-level and deep-level dissimilarity and work-related outcomes, through social inclusion. Furthermore, we tested the moderating role of a climate for inclusion in the relationship between perceived dissimilarity and felt inclusion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe review empirical research on (social) psychology of morality to identify which issues and relations are well documented by existing data and which areas of inquiry are in need of further empirical evidence. An electronic literature search yielded a total of 1,278 relevant research articles published from 1940 through 2017. These were subjected to expert content analysis and standardized bibliometric analysis to classify research questions and relate these to (trends in) empirical approaches that characterize research on morality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcross three studies, we examine the correlates of subjective well-being and mental and physical health among members of a historically disadvantaged group, namely, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. Results show those who minimize (vs. acknowledge) the extent to which their group is the target of discrimination report better well-being across myriad indicators (Studies 1-3).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArguments opposing same-sex marriage are often made on religious grounds. In five studies conducted in the United States and Canada (combined N = 1,673), we observed that religious opposition to same-sex marriage was explained, at least in part, by conservative ideology and linked to sexual prejudice. In Studies 1 and 2, we discovered that the relationship between religiosity and opposition to same-sex marriage was mediated by explicit sexual prejudice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMounting experimental evidence suggests that subtle gender biases favoring men contribute to the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), including many subfields of the life sciences. However, there are relatively few evaluations of diversity interventions designed to reduce gender biases within the STEM community. Because gender biases distort the meritocratic evaluation and advancement of students, interventions targeting instructors' biases are particularly needed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThree studies examined the hypothesis that system justification is negatively associated with collective protest against ingroup disadvantage. Effects of uncertainty salience, ingroup identification, and disruptive versus nondisruptive protest were also investigated. In Study 1, college students who were exposed to an uncertainty salience manipulation and who scored higher on system justification were less likely to protest against the governmental bailout of Wall Street.
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