Developing Effective Strategies for Confronting Racial Bias in Interpersonal Interactions

制定有效的策略来应对人际交往中的种族偏见

• 批准号: 1514137
• 负责人: Margo Monteith
• 金额: $ 21.36万
• 依托单位: Purdue University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-01 至 2017-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1514137&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Developing; Effective; Strategies; Confronting; Racial

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.

社会、行为和经济科学理事会提供博士后研究金，为最近的博士毕业生提供获得额外培训的机会，在知名科学家的赞助下获得研究经验，并在本科和研究生培训之外拓宽他们的科学视野。博士后研究金的进一步设计是为了帮助新科学家跨越传统学科领域指导他们的研究工作，并利用独特的研究资源、地点和设施，包括在国外。这个博士后奖学金支持在社会心理学研究种族偏见领域的上升学者。关于社会中种族偏见的运作有很多观点，然而，人们经常回避关于种族问题的对话，因为他们可能会紧张和不舒服。事实上，在关于种族偏见的对话中出现分歧通常会导致防御、愤怒和退缩？关注他人的情绪，抑制换位思考和下游的态度和行为变化。这项研究计划结合了社会心理学的奖学金，面对种族偏见，自我调节和种族间的互动，以确定策略，将缓和这些防御感。更具体地说，这个项目探讨了白人如何应对不同风格的反馈（即，在对话中，关于偏见。此外，该项目明确测试是否自我调节培训，提供洞察一个？自己的种族偏见倾向将改善白人？对抗的反应。更深入地了解对抗目标在面对面互动中的感受和反应，以及这是否会因对抗者的种族或个人使用的风格而有所不同，可以为在努力实现种族平等和社会变革时与多数群体盟友接触提供信息。这项工作的另一个好处是，它适用于创建多样性和包容性讲习班，促进自我驱动的变化，而不是那些导致其他重点（即，防御性）反应，可能导致反弹。总之，这项研究将提供有关如何面对和讨论种族偏见的方式，将激励个人走向社会变革，并促进相互理解的相关性和流行的种族偏见在今天的实用知识？目前的研究通过探索人们如何应对不同类型的种族偏见对抗来推进社会心理学理论。基于自决理论和偏见的自我调节模型，四个实验实证测试了白人如何应对强调遵守社会规范的对抗（即，控制策略）与强调遵守个人平等主义标准的对抗（即，支持性战略）。第一项研究使用自由回忆范式，探讨白人是否自发区分支持性和控制性对抗，以及这如何影响他们的态度，行为和种族偏见对抗者的看法。随后的实验测试来自对抗者的安全提示（即，共享的种族群体）和来自自我的安全线索（即，培训强调一？的倾向，种族偏见和自我调节）缓和负面反应，以控制种族偏见的对抗。最后一项研究通过研究白人如何应对面对面的对抗来模仿现实世界中关于种族的对话，以及安全提示（来自他人和自我）是否会鼓励对抗目标中更积极，更可感知的差异？的行为。总之，本研究扩展了过去的工作，确定何时以及为什么种族偏见对抗干扰自我调节过程，并通过创造干预的方法，以鼓励参与未来的组间接触。