Publications by authors named "William T L Cox"

Background: Health care routinely fails Indigenous peoples and anti-Indigenous racism is common in clinical encounters. Clinical training programs aimed to enhance Indigenous cultural safety (ICS) rely on learner reported impact assessment even though clinician self-assessment is poorly correlated with observational or patient outcome reporting. We aimed to compare the clinical impacts of intensive and brief ICS training to control, and to assess the feasibility of ICS training evaluation tools, including unannounced Indigenous standardized patient (UISP) visits.

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Article Synopsis
  • The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures implicit evaluations by analyzing how quickly participants categorize different faces and words in various trials.
  • The study investigates whether response times in the IAT change within the task and how these changes relate to external measures of cognitive biases and behaviors.
  • Findings reveal that IAT scores can vary within a session, suggesting that the dynamics of response times are important, although further research is required to understand the full implications of these changes.
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Purpose –: Research consistently shows that non-scientific bias, equity, and diversity trainings do not work, and often make bias and diversity problems worse. Despite these widespread failures, there is considerable reason for hope that effective, meaningful DEI efforts can be developed. One approach in particular, the bias habit-breaking training, has 15 years of experimental evidence demonstrating its widespread effectiveness and efficacy.

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In the present work, we set out to assess whether and how much people learn in response to their stereotypic assumptions being confirmed, being disconfirmed, or remaining untested. In Study 1, participants made a series of judgments that could be influenced by stereotypes and received feedback that confirmed stereotypes the majority of the time, feedback that disconfirmed stereotypes the majority of the time, or no feedback on their judgments. Replicating past work on confirmation bias, patterns in the conditions with feedback indicated that pieces of stereotype-confirming evidence exerted more influence than stereotype-disconfirming evidence.

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Smiles are nonverbal signals that convey social information and influence the social behavior of recipients, but the precise form and social function of a smile can be variable. In previous work, we have proposed that there are at least three physically distinct types of smiles associated with specific social functions: reward smiles signal positive affect and reinforce desired behavior; affiliation smiles signal non-threat and promote peaceful social interactions; dominance smiles signal feelings of superiority and are used to negotiate status hierarchies. The present work advances the science of the smile by addressing a number of questions that directly arise from this smile typology.

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Many granting agencies allow reviewers to know the identity of a proposal's principal investigator (PI), which opens the possibility that reviewers discriminate on the basis of PI race and gender. We investigated this experimentally with 48 NIH R01 grant proposals, representing a broad range of NIH-funded science. We modified PI names to create separate white male, white female, black male and black female versions of each proposal, and 412 scientists each submitted initial reviews for 3 proposals.

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Addressing the underrepresentation of women in science is a top priority for many institutions, but the majority of efforts to increase representation of women are neither evidence-based nor rigorously assessed. One exception is the gender bias habit-breaking intervention (Carnes et al., 2015), which, in a cluster-randomized trial involving all but two departmental clusters ( = 92) in the 6 STEMM focused schools/colleges at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, led to increases in gender bias awareness and self-efficacy to promote gender equity in academic science departments.

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The prejudice habit-breaking intervention (Devine et al., 2012) and its offshoots (e.g.

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In recent years, several empirical studies have claimed to provide evidence in support of the popular folk notion that people possess "gaydar" that enables them to accurately identify who is gay or lesbian (Rule, Johnson, & Freeman, 2016). This conclusion is limited to artificial lab settings, however, and when translated to real-world settings this work itself provides evidence that people's judgments about who is gay/lesbian are not pragmatically accurate. We also briefly review evidence related to the consequences of perpetuating the idea of gaydar (i.

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Contemporary prejudice research focuses primarily on people who are motivated to respond without prejudice and the ways in which unintentional bias can cause these people to act in a manner inconsistent with this motivation. However, some real-world phenomena (e.g.

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In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called "gaydar," to detect who is gay. We propose that "gaydar" is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g.

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We advance a theory-driven approach to stereotype structure, informed by connectionist theories of cognition. Whereas traditional models define or tacitly assume that stereotypes possess inherently Group → Attribute activation directionality (e.g.

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In the present study, participants administered painful electric shocks to an unseen male opponent who was either explicitly labeled as gay or stereotypically implied to be gay. Identifying the opponent with a gay-stereotypic attribute produced a situation in which the target's group status was privately inferred but plausibly deniable to others. To test the plausible deniability hypothesis, we examined aggression levels as a function of internal (personal) and external (social) motivation to respond without prejudice.

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We developed a multi-faceted prejudice habit-breaking intervention to produce long-term reductions in implicit race bias. The intervention is based on the premise that implicit bias is like a habit that can be reduced through a combination of awareness of implicit bias, concern about the effects of that bias, and the application of strategies to reduce bias. In a 12-week longitudinal study, people who received the intervention showed dramatic reductions in implicit race bias.

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Social psychologists fighting prejudice and clinical psychologists fighting depression have long been separated by the social-clinical divide, unaware that they were facing a common enemy. Stereotypes about others leading to prejudice (e.g.

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