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Gender disparities in participation at conferences is a well-studied phenomenon, and seem to be propelled by men being more likely to initiate questions. An unexplored explanation for why this gap may occur is that women may be more likely than men to fear backlash for their participation. Across four studies, we tested fears of backlash as a mechanism to explain gender gaps in Q&A session participation. Fears of backlash explained the variance between gender and question-asking intentions in a hypothetical scenario. Women’s reduced fears of backlash were attenuated in friendly as compared to typical audience, but friendly audiences also emboldened men to take up more space. There was not an effect of Q&A formats on gendered participation. When considering why women might be less

National policies have targeted widespread exclusionary discipline in schools which is associated with negative academic outcomes. Principals play an important role in making disciplinary decisions, yet little is understood about how their mindsets might impact disciplinary decisions. We hypothesized that principals' mindsets regarding the purpose of discipline (exclusion versus prevention) would predict their responses to misbehavior. In a random nation-wide sample (N=234), principals responded to misbehavior by a hypothetical Black or White student. Exclusion beliefs predicted more severe discipline, while prevention beliefs predicted greater endorsement of referring the student to a school counselor. Principal prevention mindsets also predicted less exclusionary discipline in real-world contexts.

Disclosure—the sharing of personal information—has long been appreciated as a key element of strong, close relationships. But its exploration in educational contexts has been limited. In the present study, we examine whether disclosure in mentoring relationships between a college student and a school-based “adult” is associated with benefits, controlling for the student’s achievement and assessments of their potential. Using data from a selective university that includes both mentor and mentee reports (N=143 pairs), we find that mentoring relationships characterized by greater personal disclosure provide mentees with more resources and continue to a greater extent after mentees graduate.

Question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions following research talks provide key opportunities for the audience to engage in scientific discourse. Gender inequities persist in academia, where women are underrepresented as faculty and their contributions are less valued than men’s. In the present research, we tested how this gender difference translates to face-to-face Q&A-session participation and its psychological correlates. Across two studies examining participation in three conferences, men disproportionately participated in Q&A sessions in a live, recorded conference ( N = 189 Q&A interactions), and women were less comfortable participating in Q&A sessions and more likely to fear backlash for their participation ( N = 234 conference attendees). Additionally, women were more likely to hold back questions because of anxiety, whereas men were more likely to hold back questions to make space for others to participate. To the extent that men engage more than women in Q&A sessions, men may continue to have more influence over the direction of science.

Gender and racial diversity in tech is a persistent issue in the United States. Efforts to increase diversity may not be effective due to moral licensing and viewing underrepresented groups interchangeably. Moral licensing has focused on effects within one identity (displays of feminist beliefs leading to sexist actions). We test whether moral licensing can reverberate across identities: cross-identity moral licensing (displays of feminist beliefs leading to racist actions). Study 1, showed no effects of moral licensing on hiring decisions using the original manipulation. In Study 2, hiring managers in the tech sector completed two successive hiring rounds, with the first designed to license the second. White women were negatively impacted by same-identity and cross-identity moral licensing, while there were no effects of moral licensing for Black men. This work provides preliminary evidence that cross-identity moral licensing could help explain why efforts to increase representation fall short for women in tech.

In the classroom, Black students are disciplined more frequently and more severely for the same misbehaviors as White students. Though teachers have influence over disciplinary actions, the final decisions for exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspensions and expulsions) are principals’ responsibility. We test how principals make disciplinary decisions in a preregistered experiment. Principals endorsed more severe discipline for Black students compared with White students across two time points. Further, this discipline severity was explained through Black students being more likely to be labeled a troublemaker than White students. Future efforts should focus on principals in order to mitigate the negative impacts of the school-to-prison pipeline.

We test the hypothesis that partners’ tendency to “keep score” in a relationship—as reflected in their exchange orientation—will moderate the effect of daily conflicts on their relationship evaluations. Cohabitating romantic partners ( N = 82 couples) participated in a 28-day daily diary study. Partners higher in exchange orientation showed lower intimacy with their partner on days with conflict compared to days without conflict; the effect was attenuated for partners lower in exchange orientation. This result held even while adjusting for daily negative affect. We conclude that close monitoring of costs and benefits in a relationship, a characteristic of partners with high exchange orientation, may lead partners to overreact to simple daily conflicts, to the detriment of relationship evaluations.

Across four studies (N = 1,555) we find that individuals perceive teams with hierarchical representation (i.e., minority employees represented throughout their hierarchy) as more attractive than equally diverse teams that lack hierarchical representation. Teams with hierarchical representation are perceived as more diverse and as having superior team functioning (Study 1). Furthermore, the effect of hierarchical representation on team attractiveness did not differ between racial minority and majority participants (Studies 2-3), suggesting that attitudes about race among racial majority members might have evolved since a previous study found only racial minorities to be concerned with hierarchical representation. Additionally, diverse teams without hierarchical representation are perceived as no more attractive than hierarchical teams with objectively lower diversity (Study 3) and non-hierarchical teams without diversity (Study 4). These studies highlight the importance of minority representation across every echelon of a hierarchy rather than only at lower levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the context and delivery of early childhood education, yet little is known about its impact on exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspension, expulsion), which nationally representative evidence has shown disproportionately impacts Black boys. Using one experiment, we test how preschool providers respond to three hypothetical vignettes about a Black boy's behaviors. Participants (N = 60) were randomly assigned to read vignettes set in either distance learning or in-person classroom contexts. Then, participants completed measures about discipline and COVID-19. Results indicated there was an interaction between context and the sequence of vignettes on providers' troubled feelings and endorsements of discipline. Providers showed heightened troubled feelings and endorsements of discipline severity in the distance learning context, as compared to an in-person context, as vignettes progressed. Additionally, the more providers feared COVID-19, the more they felt troubled over the course of the vignettes across conditions. Practitioners can use this research to inform consultative interventions that mitigate discipline by directly addressing providers' pandemic fears and classroom contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

In the classroom, Black students are disciplined more frequently and more severely for the same misbehaviors as White students. Though teachers have influence over disciplinary actions, the final decisions for exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspensions and expulsions) are principals’ responsibility. We test how principals make disciplinary decisions in a preregistered experiment. Principals endorsed more severe discipline for Black students compared with White students across two time points. Further, this discipline severity was explained through Black students being more likely to be labeled a troublemaker than White students. Future efforts should focus on principals in order to mitigate the negative impacts of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Research suggests that framing inequality as a disadvantage for one individual, versus an advantage for another, increases support for inequality reduction. The present research explores this phenomenon in a series of 12 experiments presenting inequality in three domains. Based on previous findings we expected that participants who viewed inequality presented as a disadvantage for one person, rather than an advantage for another, would be more likely to acknowledge the negative effects of inequality and support efforts to reduce it. Additionally, self versus other effects, as well participant political orientation, were tested as potential moderators of these framing effects. Overall, these 12 experiments yielded mixed results, providing limited evidence for the effects of framing on endorsement of inequality and support for its reduction.

Access to education is important for success as an adult. Exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspensions) reduces opportunities for students to complete their education and be strong candidates for future jobs. Black students face a disproportionately high risk of disciplinary action. Thus, it is important to understand when and how racial disparities in suspensions emerge in order to reduce their disproportionate negative impacts on Black students. Past research found racial disparities emerge after two misbehaviors among teachers and just a single misbehavior among assistant principals. The current research tests the generalizability of racial disparities in discipline from principals across the United States and a psychological process that potentially contributes to the racial disparities: their perception of their professional role relative to that of teachers. In this procedure and with a diverse sample, principals did not endorse significantly different amounts of discipline for Black and White students. We explore potential explanations of these null results in the discussion.

Empirical audit and review is an approach to assessing the evidentiary value of a research area. It involves identifying a topic and selecting a cross-section of studies for replication. We apply the method to research on the psychological consequences of scarcity. Starting with the papers citing a seminal publication in the field, we conducted replications of 20 studies that evaluate the role of scarcity priming in pain sensitivity, resource allocation, materialism, and many other domains. There was considerable variability in the replicability, with some strong successes and other undeniable failures. Empirical audit and review does not attempt to assign an overall replication rate for a heterogeneous field, but rather facilitates researchers seeking to incorporate strength of evidence as they refine theories and plan new investigations in the research area. This method allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches to review and enables the growth of a cumulative science.

For black Americans, addressing worries about belonging early in college supported a better trajectory into adult life., Could mitigating persistent worries about belonging in the transition to college improve adult life for black Americans? To examine this question, we conducted a long-term follow-up of a randomized social-belonging intervention delivered in the first year of college. This 1-hour exercise represented social and academic adversity early in college as common and temporary. As previously reported in Science, the exercise improved black students’ grades and well-being in college. The present study assessed the adult outcomes of these same participants. Examining adult life at an average age of 27, black adults who had received the treatment (versus control) exercise 7 to 11 years earlier reported significantly greater career satisfaction and success, psychological well-being, and community involvement and leadership. Gains were statistically mediated by greater college mentorship. The results suggest that addressing persistent social-psychological concerns via psychological intervention can shape the life course, partly by changing people’s social realities.

For individuals high in Rejection Sensitivity (RS; Downey & Feldman, 1996), a learned orientation to anxiously expect rejection from valued others, negative feedback from social sources may disrupt engagement with learning opportunities, impeding recovery from mistakes. One context in which this disruption may be particularly pronounced is among women high in RS following evaluation by a male in authority. To investigate this prediction, 40 college students (50% female) answered general knowledge questions followed by immediate performance feedback and the correct answer while we recorded event-related potentials. Error correction was measured with a subsequent surprise retest. Performance feedback was either nonsocial (incorrect: red asterisk/tone) or social (incorrect: male professor’s face/voice). Attention and learning were indexed respectively by the anterior frontal P3a (attentional orienting) and a set of negative-going waveforms over left-inferior-posterior regions associated with successful encoding. For women, but not men, higher RS scores predicted poorer error correction in the social condition. A path analysis suggested that, for women, high RS disrupted attentional orienting to social-evaluative feedback, which affected subsequent memory for the correct answer by reducing engagement with learning opportunities. These results suggest a mechanism for how social feedback may impede learning among women who are high in RS.

Self-projection is the ability to orient the self in different places in time and space. Episodic memory, prospection, and theory of mind (ToM) are all cognitive abilities that share an element of self-projection. Previous research has posited that each of these abilities stem from the same neural network (Buckner & Carroll, 2006). The current study compared performance of cognitively healthy older adults and younger adults on several self-projection tasks to examine the relatedness of these constructs behaviorally. Episodic memory and prospection were measured using an episodic interview task where the participants were asked to remember or imagine events that either had happened in the past or could happen in the future and then gave ratings describing the extent to which they were mentally experiencing the event and from what perspective they viewed it. ToM was measured by asking participants to make judgments regarding the intentions of characters described in stories that involved cognitive, affective, or ironic components. Our results demonstrate that aging influences episodic memory, prospection, and ToM similarly: older adult participants showed declines on each of these measures compared to younger adults. Further, we observed correlations between performance on the measures of episodic memory and prospection as well as between episodic memory and ToM, although no correlation between prospection and ToM was observed after controlling for chronological age. We discuss these results in the light of theories suggesting that each of these abilities is governed by a common brain system.