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For group discussions about fraught racial topics between Black and White Americans to be beneficial, conversation participants must view the person who facilitates as effective at communicating both the perspectives of Black and White Americans. We identify a biracial advantage in this domain. In three studies (total N = 710), we tested how a facilitator’s race affects their perceived effectiveness in communicating with both Black and White Americans. Both Black and White participants expected Black and White monoracial facilitators to more effectively engage with racial in-group than racial out-group members. However, they expected biracial facilitators to be equally effective in communicating with both Black and White groups. Both Black and White participants also expected biracial facilitators to use productive learning strategies (perspective taking, showing empathy) more than White facilitators, and either more than or equally to Black facilitators, suggesting one reason why people expect biracial facilitators to perform well in these moments.

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem). Our knowledge is limited concerning both the universality of these effects outside the United States and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors affecting moral judgements. Thus, we empirically tested the universality of the effects of intent and personal force on moral dilemma judgements by replicating the experiments of Greene et al. in 45 countries from all inhabited continents. We found that personal force and its interaction with intention exert influence on moral judgements in the US and Western cultural clusters, replicating and expanding the original findings. Moreover, the personal force effect was present in all cultural clusters, suggesting it is culturally universal. The evidence for the cultural universality of the interaction effect was inconclusive in the Eastern and Southern cultural clusters (depending on exclusion criteria). We found no strong association between collectivism/individualism and moral dilemma judgements. Including participants from 45 countries, Bago et al. find that the situational factors that affect moral reasoning are shared across countries, with diminished observed cultural variation., Comunidad de Madrid [2016-T1/SOC-1395, 2020-5A/SOC-19723]; AEI [PSI2017-85159-P]; UE/FEDER; National Science Centre, Poland [2017/01/X/HS6/01332, 2015/19/D/HS6/00641, 2019/35/B/HS6/00528]; Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF) [AUFF-E-2019-9-4]; ANR [ANR-17-EURE-0010]; ANR Labex IAST; Australian Research Council [DP180102384]; CAPES [88887.364180/2019-00]; Carlsberg Foundation [CF16-0444]; Independent Research Fund Denmark [7024-00057B]; Germany's Excellence Strategy [EXC 2126/1-390838866]; FONDECYT, CONICYT [11190980]; German Research Foundation [FOR-2150, LA 3566/1-2]; JSPS [18K03010]; JSPS KAKENHI [16H03079, 17H00875, 18K12015, 20H04581, 17H06342, 20K03479, 20KK0054, 20J21976]; Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [31530032]; Key Technological Projects of Guangdong Province [2018B030335001]; National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [DGE-1839285]; Polish National Science Center; DFG Beethoven [2016/23/G/HS6/01775]; Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology [SFRH/BD/126304/2016, UID/PSI/03125/2019]; PRIN 2017 (Italian Ministry of Education and Research) [20178293XT]; PSA 006 BRA 008 Data Collection in Support of PSADM 001 Measurement Invariance Project; Foundation for Polish Science (START); National Science Centre [2020/36/T/HS6/00256, 2019/33/N/HS6/00054]; Slovak Research and Development Agency [APVV-18-0140, APVV-17-0418, PRIMUS/20/HUM/009, APVV-17-0596]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [950-224884]; Swedish Research Council [2016-06793]; Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province [2020SJA0017], M.A. Vadillo was supported by 2016-T1/SOC-1395 and 2020-5A/SOC-19723 from Comunidad de Madrid, PSI2017-85159-P from AEI and UE/FEDER. M.P.-C. was supported by 2017/01/X/HS6/01332 from the National Science Centre, Poland. P.M. was supported by Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF), starting grant: AUFF-E-2019-9-4. B. Bago was supported by ANR grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d'Avenir programme) and ANR Labex IAST. R.M.R. was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP180102384). N.B.D. was supported by CAPES grant no. 88887.364180/2019-00. C.S., K.A.. and I. Zettler were supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (CF16-0444) and the Independent Research Fund Denmark (7024-00057B). J.L. was supported by EXC 2126/1-390838866 under Germany's Excellence Strategy. K.B. was supported by the following grants from the National Science Centre, Poland: (1) while working on the data collection, no. 2015/19/D/HS6/00641, (2) while working on the final version of the paper, no. 2019/35/B/HS6/00528. A.W. was supported by FONDECYT 11190980, CONICYT. A. Fleischmann was supported by the German Research Foundation (research unit grant FOR-2150, LA 3566/1-2). H.Y. was supported by JSPS grant 18K03010. Y.Y. was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (16H03079, 17H00875, 18K12015 and 20H04581). K.Q. was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (17H06342, 20K03479 and 20KK0054). A. Ikeda was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (20J21976). K.M.K. was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant no. 31530032 and Key Technological Projects of Guangdong Province grant no. 2018B030335001. J.B.C. was supported by National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship grant no. DGE-1839285. M. Parzuchowski, K. Rybus and N.M.S. were supported by Polish National Science Center and DFG Beethoven grant 2016/23/G/HS6/01775. A.C.S. was supported by Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology grant no. SFRH/BD/126304/2016. L. Boncinelli was supported by PRIN 2017 grant no. 20178293XT (Italian Ministry of Education and Research). M.F.F.R. was supported by PSA 006 BRA 008 Data Collection in Support of PSADM 001 Measurement Invariance Project. M. Misiak was supported by a scholarship from the Foundation for Polish Science (START) and by a scholarship from the National Science Centre (2020/36/T/HS6/00256). P.B. was supported by Slovak Research and Development Agency project no. APVV-18-0140. M.A. was supported by Slovak Research and Development Agency project no. APVV-17-0418 and project PRIMUS/20/HUM/009. A. Findor and M.H. were supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-17-0596. T.G. was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (no. 950-224884). P.P. was supported by the Swedish Research Council (2016-06793). Y.L. was supported by The Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (grant no. 2020SJA0017). M. Kowal was supported by a scholarship from the National Science Centre (2019/33/N/HS6/00054). P.A. was supported by UID/PSI/03125/2019 from the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

To help children navigate their social environments, adults must understand what children know about race, and when they acquire this knowledge. Across three preregistered studies, we tested United States adults' knowledge of when children first use race to categorize and ascribe traits to others. Participants wildly-and uniquely-misjudged children's abilities to process race. This inaccuracy was consequential: it was a stronger predictor of the preference to delay conversations about race with children than other factors previously theorized to underlie adults' reluctance to talk about race. And, this relation was causal. Our data suggest that fundamental misunderstandings about children's capacities to process race are pervasive in the United States population and may delay when adults engage children in important conversations about race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Transgender individuals experience stigmatization through the application of gender stereotypes. In Study 1, cisgender individuals (N = 212) produced unique stereotypes, such as “mentally ill” and ...

Correction to: Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01319-5, published online 14 April 2022.

Essentialism—the belief that differences between groups of people are biologically based and unchangeable—is strongly associated with prejudice toward a variety of social groups. The present work examines how gender essentialism shapes support for the rights of two marginalized gender groups: women and transgender people. Study 1 provides correlational evidence that endorsement of gender essentialism is a robust predictor of people’s opposition to both women’s and transgender people’s rights, over and above other individual difference measures. Studies 2 and 3 provide evidence that exposure to anti-essentialist messages about gender indirectly increases the support for women’s and transgender people’s rights. Study 4 examines the underlying psychological process, showing that gender essentialism reduction indirectly increases the support for women’s and transgender people’s rights through prejudice. Implications for research on lay theories and transgender people are discussed.

Many companies highlight their gender diversity, in part to signal positive attributes about the organization. We explored whether or not advertising gender diversity improves White men’s beliefs about an organization. In four studies, we found that White men expected a company to have a more broadminded and tolerant climate when the company noted it was gender diverse––and the gender diversity was described as including White women––as compared to when it did not address its gender diversity. In Studies 1 ( n = 105), 2 ( n = 101), and 3 ( n = 151), a White gender-diverse organization was also viewed as more prestigious than an organization that did not address its gender diversity. In Studies 3 and 4 ( n = 183), a gender-diverse company that highlighted a Black woman employee did not receive the same overall reputation boosts as the White gender-diverse company did. Our research indicates that companies that advertise their gender diversity may receive a boost to their reputation. We suggest that this research can inform organizational efforts to address gender diversity by encouraging companies to consider the intersection of gender and race in shaping both prejudicial attitudes and the experiences of minority groups. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684318800264

A substantial body of research on diversity philosophies has shown that multiculturalism (i.e., emphasizing and valuing cultural/ethnic differences) is a more effective way to promote equality and ...

How do voters’ identities change after a candidate’s defeat? A longitudinal, within-subjects study used Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to explore social identity theo...

Organizations aim to convey that they are diverse and inclusive, in part, to recruit racial minorities. We investigate a previously unexamined downside of this recruitment strategy: diversity dishonesty, that is, belief that an organization is falsely or incorrectly inflating its actual diversity. In four studies (total N = 871), we found that diversity dishonesty heightened minorities’ concerns about fitting in, being authentic, and performing well at the organization. We also found that evidence-based cues (which “show” observers whether the organization has a positive or negative diversity climate), but not expressed cues (which “tell” observers about the organization’s diversity), affect these expectations. Using correlational methodologies, Study 1 found these effects were pertinent to African American and Latinx participants’ beliefs about their current workplaces, holding other diversity-related measures constant. Studies 2 to 4 used experimental methods to replicate these findings with African American participants, using a hypothetical workplace setting.

Previous research suggests that a person’s racial identity shapes the way others respond when that person speaks out against racial prejudice. In the present research, we consider instead how speaking out against racial prejudice shapes people’s impressions of a confronter’s racial identity, such as experiences with discrimination, stereotype enactment, and even phenotype. Two experiments found that White perceivers evaluated a Black/White biracial person who spoke out against (vs. remained silent to) racial prejudice as more stigmatized and Black identified and as having more stereotypically Black (vs. White) preferences and Black (vs. White) ancestry when they confronted. The faces of biracial confronters (vs. nonconfronters) were also recalled as more phenotypically Black (vs. White; S2). This evidence suggests that speaking out against bias colors Whites’ impressions of a biracial target across both subjective and objective measures of racial identity. Implications for interracial interactions and interpersonal perception are discussed.

Understanding racial categorization processes has implications for how affirmative action policies are implemented. Two studies examined how socioeconomic status (SES) functions to predict support for application of affirmative action and other perceptions of Latino targets. SES emerged as a powerful predictor, over and above the influence of ancestry, on person perception (minority categorization, sociocultural cues) and support for affirmative action among both White (Studies 1 and 2) and minority (Study 2) perceivers. In conjunction with ancestry, SES influenced sociocultural impressions, such as perceptions of discrimination (Study 1 and Study 2) and cultural practices (Study 2), which informed support for implementation of affirmative action policies. Furthermore, the joint influence of SES and ancestry on affirmative action policies persisted even when controlling for general attitudes towards affirmative action (Study 2). Results suggest that SES is an important factor in person perception, and that perceptions of discrimination play a strong role in how “deserving” a target is of affirmative action.

The present research investigates the effects of a subtle essentialist cue: restricting individuals to identify with only one ethnicity. Although this constraint is mundane and commonly used in everyday life, it sends a message of essentialized group differences. Three studies illustrate the harmful impact of this essentialist cue on diversity. Studies 1a and 1b show that it decreases Asian-Americans' desire to participate in ethnicity-related activities. Study 2 reveals that it reduces essentialist European-Americans' desire for friendship with a minority target. Study 3 illustrates the mechanism through which an essentialist cue reduces intergroup contact, with perceivers' chronic beliefs moderating this effect. Together, these findings demonstrate the powerful impact of the seemingly small act of how we ask people to identify with an ethnic group.

Biracial individuals threaten the distinctiveness of racial groups because they have mixed-race ancestry, but recent findings suggest that exposure to biracial-labeled, racially ambiguous faces may positively influence intergroup perception by reducing essentialist thinking among Whites ( Young, Sanchez, & Wilton, 2013 ). However, biracial exposure may not lead to positive intergroup perceptions for Whites who are highly racially identified and thus motivated to preserve the social distance between racial groups. We exposed Whites to racially ambiguous Asian/White biracial faces and measured the perceived similarity between Asians and Whites. We found that exposure to racially ambiguous, biracial-labeled targets may improve perceptions of intergroup similarity, but only for Whites who are less racially identified. Results are discussed in terms of motivated intergroup perception.

Racial essentialism refers to the widely held belief that race is a biological, stable, and natural category. Although research finds very little evidence that race has biological underpinnings, racial essentialist beliefs persist and are linked to negative outgroup consequences. This study initially demonstrates that label and visual ambiguity concurrently inform racial categorization. It then tests whether exposure to racially ambiguous targets (a) challenges essentialism when ambiguous targets are labeled with biracial categories and (b) reinforces essentialism when ambiguous targets identify with monoracial categories. The results showed that White perceivers (N = 84) who were exposed to racially ambiguous, biracially labeled targets showed reductions in their essentialist thinking about race, whereas perceivers who were exposed to racially ambiguous, monoracially labeled targets showed increases in their essentialist beliefs.

When Barack Obama became the “first Black President” of the United States in 2008, researchers examined how his election impacted Americans’ views of racial progress. When he was reelected in 2012, the minority status of the president had become less novel. In the present study, we investigated whether perceptions concerning racial progress varied: (1) before and after President Obama’s reelection; (2) by whether President Obama was labeled as biracial or Black; and (3) among White and Black individuals. We replicated past findings to demonstrate that after Obama’s reelection, White participants reported that our country had made racial progress and decreased their support for equality programs (e.g., affirmative action). Our results also revealed that labeling President Obama as either biracial or Black did not affect views of racial progress. Additionally, Black participants categorized President Obama as Black more than White participants, while White participants categorized President Obama as White more than Black participants. We discuss these results in terms of the impacts of racial beliefs that stem from exposure to a minority leader.

In the current research, we posited the stigma-by-prejudice-transfer effect, which proposes that stigmatized group members (e.g., White women) are threatened by prejudice that is directed at other stigmatized group members (e.g., African Americans) because they believe that prejudice has monolithic qualities. While most stigma researchers assume that there is a direct correspondence between the attitude of prejudiced individuals and the targets (i.e., sexism affects women, racism affects racial minorities), the five studies reported here demonstrate that White women can be threatened by racism (Study 1, 3, 4, and 5) and men of color by sexism (Study 2). Robust to perceptions of liking and the order in which measures were administered, results showed that prejudice transfers between racism and sexism were driven by the presumed social dominance orientation of the prejudiced individual. In addition, important downstream consequences, such as the increased likelihood of anticipated stigma, expectations of unfair treatment, and the attribution of negative feedback to sexism, appeared for stigmatized individuals.

Racial identification is a complex and dynamic process for multiracial individuals, who as members of multiple racial groups have been shown to self-identify or be identified by others differently, depending on the social context. For biracial individuals who have white and minority ancestry, such identity shifting (e.g., from minority to white, or vice versa) may be a way to cope with the threats to their racial identity that can be signaled by the presence or absence of whites and/or minorities in their social environment. We examine whether stigma con- sciousness (Pinel in J Pers Soc Psychol 76(1):114-128, 1999; i.e., the chronic awareness of the stereotyping and prejudice that minorities face) interacts with the sociocul- tural context to predict social identity threat, belonging, and racial identification. Using experience sampling methodology, minority/white biracial individuals (27 Asian/white, 22 black/white, and 26 Latino/white) reported the racial composition of their environment, social identity threat for their component racial identities, overall feelings of belonging, and racial identification over a 1-week per- iod. Results suggest that stigma consciousness predicts the extent to which biracial people identify with their white background and experience belonging in different racial contexts. We discuss racial identity shifting in response to context-based threats as a protective strategy for biracial people, and identity where participants' sociocultural contexts and experiences with racial identity and threat differ as a result of their minority racial group or ascribed race.

The present studies examined whether colorblind diversity messages, relative to multicultural diversity messages, serve as an identity threat that undermines performance-related outcomes for individuals at the intersections of race and gender. We exposed racial/ethnic majority and minority women and men to either a colorblind or multicultural diversity statement and then measured their expectations about overall diversity, anticipated bias, and group task performance (Study 1, N = 211), as well as their expectations about distinct race and gender diversity and their actual performance on a math test (Study 2, N = 328). Participants expected more bias (Study 1) and less race and gender diversity (Study 2) after exposure to a colorblind versus a multicultural message. However, the colorblind message was particularly damaging for women of color, prompting them to expect the least diversity overall and to perform worse (Study 1), as well as to actually perform worse on a math test (Study 2) than the multicultural message. White women demonstrated the opposite pattern, performing better on the math test in the colorblind versus the multicultural condition, whereas racial minority and majority men's performances were not affected by different messages about diversity. We discuss the importance of examining psychological processes that underscore performance-related outcomes at the junction of race and gender.