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.
The current study examines how gender discrimination by adults in school is linked with depressive symptoms and sleep duration over time in middle school. The main goal is to test one psychological mechanism that can account for such associations: perceived school unfairness. Relying on a racially-ethnically diverse sample of girls (N = 2,718, M age = 13.01, SD age = 0.39) from 26 middle schools, multilevel mediation analyses revealed that girls who experienced school-based gender discrimination by an adult in seventh grade reported higher levels of perceived school unfairness in eighth grade. Moreover, perceived unfairness, in turn, was associated with more depressive symptoms and shorter sleep durations by eighth grade. Implications of changes in adolescent girls' sleep and mood related to their experiences of gender discrimination are discussed.
Objective: The current work explores the effects of racial miscategorization (incongruence between other people's racial categorization of an individual and that individual's racial self-identification) and subjective well-being of multiracial individuals in Hawai'i versus California. We set out to examine how multiracial individuals experience racial miscategorization in more or less ethnically diverse environments and how this experience shapes the extent to which they feel a sense of belonging and inclusion. Method: The study consisted of interviews with 55 multiracial undergraduate and graduate students conducted in Hawai'i (20 selfidentified women and 9 self-identified men, with ages ranging from 18 to 47 years; M = 22.93, SD = 6.40) and California (16 self-identified women, 9 self-identified men, and 1 self-identified gender nonbinary person, with ages ranging from 18 to 31 years; M = 20.96, SD = 2.76). Results: Thematic analysis identified two central themes relevant to subjective well-being: (a) racial miscategorization and its consequences and (b) contextual differences in the experiences of miscategorization. Results suggest that racial miscategorization is a pervasive experience among multiracial people and is associated with negative psychological well-being. We also found that environments with greater representation of multiracial individuals, such as Hawai'i, are associated with less racial miscategorization, more inclusion, and better psychological well-being among multiracial individuals. Conclusions: Racial miscategorization is a prominent and aversive experience among multiracial individuals, but multiracial environments can serve as a psychological buffer. Racial miscategorization has important theoretical and practical implications for racial and ethnic identity research, which we discuss. Public Significance StatementThis study advances the idea that multiracial individuals frequently face situations in which others' racial categorizations of them (e.g., White) differ from their own racial identification (e.g., White and Black). We label this phenomenon as "racial miscategorization" and find evidence that these frequent experiences negatively affect multiracial people's well-being. Contrasting qualitative data from focus groups in California to Hawai'i, this study reveals that racial miscategorization is less common in Hawai'i than in California, and that the social and demographic contexts of each location (e.g., representation of multiracial people) shape multiracial people's incorporation of these experiences. Together, these findings highlight the importance of studying processes related to miscategorization by others, and to include environmental factors in the analysis. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
To gain insights into whether schools striving to improve intergroup dynamics should curb disliking or facilitate liking across students of different ethnic groups, the current study examines the associations between interpersonal affect and intergroup relations in multiethnic schools. Given (i.e., outgoing) peer nominations of liked and disliked grade-mates were coded by ethnicity in 26 public middle schools, including all Asian, Black, Latinx, and White students ( N = 4,350). Controlling for earlier intergroup attitudes and the availability of ethnic ingroup and relevant outgroup grade-mates, multilevel analyses show that liking (but not disliking) of cross-ethnic grade-mates was associated with more positive attitudes toward that particular ethnic group. Implications of these findings for intergroup relations among adolescents in multiethnic schools are discussed.
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