Search

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on May 21 2020 (see record 2020-36018-001). In the article, the phrase Mixed Effects in the table title for Tables 1-3 and Tables 6-8 is incorrect. The corrected phrase should appear instead as Fixed Effects. All versions of this article have been corrected.] In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is conceptualized as a White man predicts the extent to which White men are perceived as particularly fit for leadership. We found support for this across 7 studies. In Study 1, we created 2 measures to examine the extent to which U.S. Christians conceptualized God as a White man, and in Study 2 we found that, controlling for multiple covariates (e.g., racist and sexist attitudes, religiosity, political attitudes), responses on these measures predicted perceiving White male job candidates as particularly fit for leadership, among both Black and White, male and female, Christians. In Study 3, we found that U.S. Christian children, both White and racial minority, conceptualized God as more White than Black (and more male than female), which predicted perceiving White people as particularly boss-like. We next found evidence to suggest that this phenomenon is rooted in broader intuitions that extend beyond Christianity. That is, in a novel context with novel groups and a novel god, U.S. Christian adults (Studies 4 and 6), atheist adults (Study 5), and agnostic preschoolers (Study 7), used a god's identity to infer which groups were best fit for leadership. Collectively, our data reveal a clear and consistent pattern: Attributing a social identity to God predicts perceiving individuals who share that identity as more fit for leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

How do routine police encounters build or undermine community trust, and how might they contribute to racial gaps in citizen perceptions of the police? Procedural justice theory posits that officers' interpersonal communication toward the public plays a formative role, but experimental tests of this hypothesis have been constrained by the difficulties of measuring and manipulating this dimension of officer-citizen interactions. Officer-worn body camera recordings provide a novel means to overcome both of these challenges. Across five studies with laboratory and community samples, we use footage from traffic stops to examine how officers communicate to drivers and whether racial disparities in officers' communication erode institutional trust in the police. Specifically, we consider the cumulative effects of one subtle interpersonal cue: an officer's tone of voice. In Studies 1A, 1B, and 1C, participants rated thin slices of officer speech. Participants were blind to the content of the officer's words and the race of their interlocutor, yet they evaluated officers' tone toward White (vs. Black) men more positively. By manipulating participants' exposure to repeated interactions, we demonstrate that even these paraverbal aspects of police interactions shape how citizens construe the police generally (Study 2), and that racial disparities in prosodic cues undermine trust in institutions such as police departments (Study 3). Participants' trust in the police, and personal experiences of fairness, in turn, correlated with their perceptions of officer prosody across studies. Taken together, these data illustrate a cycle through which interpersonal aspects of police encounters erode institutional trust across race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Significance The tendency to view members of social outgroups as interchangeable has long been considered a core component of intergroup bias and a precursor to stereotyping and discrimination. However, the early perceptual nature of these intergroup biases is poorly understood. Here, we used a functional MRI adaptation paradigm to assess how face-selective brain regions respond to variation in physical similarity among racial ingroup (White) and outgroup (Black) faces. We conclude that differences emerge in the different tuning properties of early face-selective cortex for racial ingroup and outgroup faces and mirror behavioral differences in memory and perception of racial ingroup versus outgroup faces. These results suggest that outgroup deindividuation emerges at some of the earliest stages of perception., A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants’ habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.

Recent work suggests that secrecy is perceived as burdensome. A secrecy-burden relationship would have a number of consequences for cognitive, perceptual, social, and health psychology, but the reliability of these influences, and potential mechanisms that support such influences are unknown. Across 4 studies, the current work examines both the reliability of, and mechanisms that support, the influence of secrecy processes upon a judgment that varies with diminished resources (i.e., judgments of hill slant). The current work finds that a manipulation of secret "size" fails to reliably predict judged hill slant, whereas measurement and manipulation of preoccupation with a secret does reliably predict judged hill slant. Moreover, these effects are found to be mediated by judged effort to keep the secret, consistent with a resource-based mechanism of the burdens of secrecy.

Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police-community trust.

The present studies are the first in which social psychological methods were used to test the popular claim that the experience of concealing a stigmatized social identity leads to a "divided self." For people with concealable stigmas, concealment in public settings makes the public-private dimension of self-expression particularly salient, leading them to organize self-relevant information along this dimension. The result is a strengthened cognitive distinction between public and private aspects of the self, what we have termed public-private schematization. We developed and tested a measure of the cognitive accessibility of the distinction between public and private self-schemas by measuring how quickly participants sorted trait attributes into self-in-public (e.g., self-at-work) and self-in-private (e.g., self-at-home). People with more accessible distinct public and private self-schemas should be faster at categorizing trait attributes into public- and private-self aspects than those with more integrated public and private self-schemas. Relative to people without such identities, people with concealable stigmas (Study 1a, sexual orientation; Study 1b, religiosity at a secular college), show greater public-private schematization. This schematization is linked to concealment (Study 2) and to the experimental activation of concealable versus conspicuous stigmatized identities (Study 3). Implications of distinct public and private self-schemas for psychological well-being are explored in Studies 4 and 5. Two different measures of distress-perceived social stress (Study 4) and depressive symptoms (Study 5)-provided evidence showing that the accessibility of the distinction between public and private self-schemas accounted for the association of concealment on heightened distress. Implications for research on concealment and self-structure are discussed.