Developing Effective Strategies for Confronting Racial Bias in Interpersonal Interactions

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar in the field of social psychology researching racial bias. There are many perspectives about the operation of racial bias in society, and yet, people often shirk away from conversations about racial issues-of-the-day because they can be tense and uncomfortable. Indeed, disagreement during conversations about racial bias typically engenders defensiveness, anger, and withdrawal?other-focused emotions that inhibit perspective-taking and downstream attitudinal and behavioral change. This research program combines social psychological scholarship on confronting racial bias, self-regulation, and interracial interactions to identify strategies that will temper these feelings of defensiveness. More specifically, this project explores how Whites respond to different styles of feedback (i.e., confrontation) during conversations about bias. Additionally, this project explicitly tests whether self-regulation training that provides insight into one?s own propensity for racial bias will improve Whites? reactions to confrontation. Achieving greater insight into how confrontation targets feel and respond in face-to-face interactions, and whether this differs based on the race of the confronter or the style that individual uses, can inform ways to engage majority group allies when working toward racial equality and social change. An additional benefit of this work is its applicability for creating diversity and inclusion workshops that promote self-driven change, instead of ones that result in other-focused (i.e., defensive) reactions that can lead to backlash. Taken together, this research will provide practical knowledge about how to confront and discuss racial bias in ways that will motivate individuals toward social change and foster mutual understanding of the relevance and prevalence of racial bias in today?s society. The present studies advance social psychological theory by exploring how people respond to different types of racial bias confrontation. Building on self-determination theory and the self-regulation model of prejudice, four experiments empirically test how Whites respond to confrontation that emphasizes compliance with social norms (i.e., a controlling strategy) compared to confrontation that emphasizes compliance with personal egalitarian standards (i.e., an autonomy-supportive strategy). The first study uses a free-recall paradigm to explore whether Whites spontaneously distinguish between autonomy-supportive and controlling confrontations, and how this affects their attitudes, behavior, and perceptions of racial bias confronters. The subsequent experiments test whether safety cues from the confronter (i.e., shared racial group) and safety cues from the self (i.e., training that emphasize one?s propensity for racial bias and self-regulation) temper negative reactions to controlling racial bias confrontation. The final study mimics real-world conversations about race by examining how Whites respond to face-to-face confrontation, and whether safety cues (from others, and the self) encourage more positive, perceivable differences in the confrontation target?s behavior. In sum, the present research extends past work by identifying when and why racial bias confrontation interferes with self-regulatory processes, and by creating ways to intervene to encourage engagement in future intergroup contact.