Browsing by Subject "Prejudice"
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Item Let's (fire)Work Together!": Exploring the Potential for Intergroup Contact between Nonbinary and Cisgender Individuals through a Cooperative Commercial Board Game"(2021-10) Yu-Chi Wang, Yu-ChiNonbinary, transgender, and gender nonconforming students face disproportionately high rates of mistreatment related to their gender identity, including but not limited to invalidation, harassment, and violence from peers, teachers, and even school policies (James et al., 2016; Johns et al., 2019) These issues pose significant barriers to their educational success and are related to less favorable career and life outcomes. Given the success of intergroup contact for decreasing prejudice towards marginalized groups, cooperative interactions between nonbinary and cisgender individuals may reduce cisgender individuals’ anxieties about interacting with nonbinary people and reduce negative attitudes that likely lead to mistreatment of nonbinary and transgender people. Therefore, I conducted a study that focused on A) naïve cisgender participants’ attitudes towards nonbinary and trans people; and B) the nonbinary research confederates lived experiences and interpretations of these interactions. To facilitate positive contact context and prioritize nonbinary confederates’ comfort and safety during these interactions, participants played a cooperative board game together. Focus A was a quantitative randomized control trial, in which cisgender participants were randomly assigned to play a cooperative board game online with cis or nonbinary confederates. There were no significant differences in explicit attitudes reported by experimental versus control participants, and we discuss potential explanations for these results. Focus B was an interpretative phenomenological analysis of nonbinary confederates’ experiences and reflections on these interactions. Major themes that the nonbinary RAs reported were a focus on self-protection through expectation management, vigilance, and emotion management, misgendering as invalidation, representation and advocacy as empowering yet exhausting, importance of affirmation. These themes suggest helpful alterations to the interaction context and support further investigation not only into contexts that reduce distress but that also affirm and empower nonbinary individuals. The results of this study emphasize the importance of considering nonbinary individuals’ experiences—and marginalized voices and experiences at large—within intergroup contact. While this study was an initial exploration into this type of context, it will hopefully stimulate further investigation into effective yet empowering intergroup contact between nonbinary and cisgender individuals.Item When worldviews collide: the role of emotion in reactions to symbolic threats.(2011-08) Hunt, Corrie ValentineUntil recently, intergroup relations research has undervalued the role of emotion. This dissertation examines how people's emotional reactions to challenges to their cherished values--symbolic threats--shape social attitudes. I argue that people respond with distinct emotions depending on whether the symbolic threat comes from within their ingroup or from outsiders, and that these emotions explain why those who feel that their cultural values are threatened are less accepting and tolerant of outsiders. Using a survey, Study 1 showed that when participants believed that Muslims rejected core American values, they felt angry at and less sympathy toward Muslim immigrants, and in turn, opposed granting civil rights to Muslim immigrants. Participants who believed that Americans, in general, disagreed on the importance of different values felt less proud to be American and held more negative attitudes toward Americans. Study 2 showed a similar pattern of results with a different outgroup. Participants--particularly those high in authoritarianism--felt disgusted and angry with, as well as less proud of, gays and lesbians. Negative emotions explained why high authoritarians who perceived gays as a symbolic threat expressed intolerant attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Using an experimental manipulation of symbolic threat, Study 3 partially replicated the findings from Study 1. High threat from Muslim immigrants led to anger at Muslim immigrants, which in turn, predicted more negative attitudes toward Muslim immigrants. High threat from within the American ingroup made people--especially authoritarians--less proud of Americans, which predicted more negative attitudes toward the ingroup.Item White Americans’ impending doom? How changing the narrative surrounding the majority-minority shift can attenuate perceived threat among White Americans and reduce hostility and negative affect toward minority outgroups(2022-05) Aguilera, RafaelSince the late 2000s, Americans have participated in discourse surrounding the “majority-minority shift.” The present narrative of the majority-minority shift suggests that White Americans, compared to people of all other races and ethnicities in the U.S., will make up a racial and ethnic minority in the U.S. near the years 2040-2050. Several studies have examined both how the majority-minority shift narrative threatens White Americans and the negative downstream effects that feelings of threat often lead to (i.e., increased prejudice, support for policies that harm immigrants and racial minorities). However, little if any research has investigated ways of reducing the prejudice that many White Americans espouse as a result of learning about an impending demographic and cultural shift. This dissertation investigates two concepts, cultural inertia and polyculturalism, as a means of reducing prejudice among White Americans who learned about the “majority-minority shift.” The first concept, cultural inertia, offers a framework that can be adopted to change the majority-minority-shift narrative to a less threatening narrative by incorporating the U.S.’s rich and divers cultural past. The latter concept, polyculturalism, is an ideology that focuses on different racial and ethnic groups’ interconnected past and is associated with higher levels of tolerance for diversity and lower levels of racial and ethnic intolerance or prejudice. In two experiments I find that a narrative that incorporates the U.S.’s dynamic and rich cultural past, compared to the “majority-minority shift” narrative, is associated with greater adoption of the polycultural ideology and, subsequently, lower prejudice toward racial and ethnic minorities, as well as greater support for policies that support racial and ethnic minorities’ and immigrants’ rights. However, I also find that White Americans who strongly believe that their racial group is superior to others and that White Americans as a whole have not received due recognition espouse prejudice toward racial and ethnic minorities regardless of how the coming cultural shift narrative is framed.