Structuring local environments to avoid racial diversity: Anxiety drives Whites' geographical and institutional self-segregation preferences

Anicich, Eric M.; Jachimowicz, Jon M.; Osborne, Merrick; Phillips, L Taylor

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104117

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…Past work has shown that historically advantaged group members have negative perceptions of particular policies or specific societal changes. For example, researchers have shown that white Americans see losing majority status as threatening and anxiety-inducing ( 62 , 63 ) or that white Americans report that diminishing anti-Black bias is associated with greater anti-white bias ( 34 ). Ours suggests that these findings may flow from a common source: the persistent and pernicious misbelief that equality itself is inherently zero-sum.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

2022

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Nine preregistered studies ( n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited. A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs. Finally two novel-groups experiments experiments reveal that advantaged participants’ harm misperceptions predict voting for inequality-enhancing policies that financially hurt them and against equality-enhancing policies that financially benefit them. Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making. This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

2022

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“…Racial gaps in the highest echelons of leadership are impossible for any single perspective to fully explain. On the one hand, racial gaps like these can be explained, at least in part, by structural forces: for example, by White individuals having disproportionate access to wealth (e.g., Kraus et al, 2019); by White individuals benefitting from systems of institutional segregation (e.g., Anicich et al, 2021); or by network effects that result in greater career opportunities for White than for non-White individuals (e.g., Pedulla & Pager, 2019). On the other hand, racial gaps like these can be explained by interpersonal forces: for example, by White managers' tendency to exhibit in-group favoritism in their personnel evaluations (e.g., Phillips & Jun, 2021); or by overt racial prejudice against racial outgroup members in the workplace (e.g., Quillian et al, 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

Are leaders still presumed white by default? Racial bias in leader categorization revisited.

Petsko

Rosette

2023

Journal of Applied Psychology

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In the United States, leaders of the highest valued companies, best-ranked universities, and most-consumed media outlets are more likely to be White than what would be expected based on White people’s representation in the U.S. population. One explanation for this racial gap is that U.S. respondents’ prototype of a leader is White by default—which is, in turn, what causes White (vs. non-White) people to be promoted up the organizational ladder more quickly. Although this explanation has empirical support, its central premise was recently challenged by experimental evidence documenting that U.S. respondents no longer associate leaders, more than nonleaders, with being White. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,316) on the topic of whether leaders, more than nonleaders, continue to be associated with Whiteness (i.e., being categorized as White or being represented with stereotypically White qualities). Results suggest that associations between leaders and Whiteness hold up to scrutiny, but that detecting them may depend on what methods researchers employ. In particular, when researchers use direct methods of detecting racial assumptions (e.g., self-report measures), there appears to be no evidence of an association between leaders and Whiteness (Experiment 1). Yet, when researchers use more indirect methods of detecting racial assumptions (e.g., a Princeton trilogy task), an association between leaders and Whiteness readily emerges (Experiments 2 and 3). In short, although respondents refrain from freely expressing associations they may harbor between leaders and Whiteness, these associations do not appear to have dissipated with time.

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“…Research also shows that people who are generally more open to new experiences, or who are more tolerant of diversity, are more likely to actively seek out diverse spaces (Wessel 2009). People with a more negative orientation toward ethnic minority groups, in contrast, might be less likely to seek out urban spaces that are inhabited by diverse populations (Anicich et al 2021). Positive perceptions and attitudes of residents toward racial and ethnic minorities in their neighborhood are often not the result of increased contact with these minorities, but rather the reason why such residents choose to move into a racially and ethnically mixed area in the first place (Wessel 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research shows that semipublic and institutional spaces are often governed by policies that implicitly or explicitly exclude certain sociocultural groups. Exclusionary barriers such as monetary fees, guest policies, or dress codes might structure certain spaces in a way that incidental contacts across groups are limited (Anicich et al 2021). Consumption spaces such as cafes, restaurants, or bars more or less explicitly cater toward particular sociocultural milieus (Ahn 2017).…”

Section: Urban Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Space and Social Cognition: The Effect of Urban Space on Intergroup Perceptions

Knipprath¹,

Crul²,

Waldring³

et al. 2021

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Scie

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Cities and neighborhoods are key sites of migration-related diversity. Differences in lifestyle, class, ethnicity, or religion become visible in urban spaces, such as neighborhood bars, shops, or cafes. This article applies a social cognitive approach to explore how urban spaces shape the relationship between ethnic encounters and intergroup perceptions. Theoretical work on urbanism suggests that public and private spaces have different effects on people’s perceptions of group interdependence and relative group status. This article contributes to the ongoing debate between conflict and contact schools of thought by defining how contextual conditions promote ethnic diversity’s positive or negative effects on intergroup perceptions.

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Structuring local environments to avoid racial diversity: Anxiety drives Whites' geographical and institutional self-segregation preferences

Cited by 26 publications

References 84 publications

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

Are leaders still presumed white by default? Racial bias in leader categorization revisited.

Urban Space and Social Cognition: The Effect of Urban Space on Intergroup Perceptions

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