Browsing by Subject "Stereotyping"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Evaluating the implications of stigma-induced identity threat for health and health care.
    (2010-12) Phelan, Sean Michael
    Introduction: Individuals with a stigmatized social identity may experience identity threat in the form of discrimination, prejudice, stereotype threat or internalized prejudice. Identity threat is a stressor that can contribute to physiological and psychological outcomes. In a health care setting, increased vigilance for identity threat can affect communication and impede individuals' ability to attain high-quality health care. Methods: This dissertation consists of three manuscripts that examine the implications of stigma and identity threat in the health care domain for three sets of stakeholders: patients, caregivers, and providers. The first manuscript assesses whether perceived discrimination as well as other facets of expected stigma are associated with mental and social health outcomes in a sample of 70 individuals who provide care for veterans with a traumatic brain injury. The second manuscript uses a sample of 1109 men who have been diagnosed with colorectal cancer to assess whether stigma related to cancer and self-blame or the perception that others blame them for the disease are associated with depressive symptoms. The third manuscript explores the theoretical underpinnings of identity threat as it relates to the medical encounter, provides several examples of how identity threat may affect the quality and substance of a medical encounter, and suggests evidence-based strategies to ameliorate the effects of the threat. Results: In manuscript 1, perceived discrimination and other facets of stigma were associated with strain, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and social isolation in multivariable models. In manuscript 2, cancer stigma and self-blame for acquiring cancer were associated with greater depressive symptoms, after adjustment for several known clinical and non-clinical stressors. In manuscript 3, several evidence-based strategies are presented which providers may use to communicate to clients and patients that identity threats are non-normative and individuals with stigmatized identities are safe and welcome. Conclusions: Having a stigmatized social identity and experiencing behavioral reactions to that identity has potentially numerous negative health and health behavior consequences for patients and caregivers. Health care systems and providers can create clinical environments that communicate safety for all social identities, and may improve care outcomes for several marginalized and stigmatized social groups.
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    Habits of meaning: when legal education and other professional training attenuate bias in social judgments.
    (2012-05) Girvan, Erik James
    Social-cognitive theory explains the persistence of social bias in terms of the automatic placement of individuals into social categories, the function of which is to conserve cognitive resources while providing a basis for some (even if inaccurate) inferences. Within that paradigm, bias attenuation involves transcending social categorization through effortful individuation. Research on learning and expertise supports an alternative perspective: That training to categorize entire situations using, e.g., legal rules, their implications, and associated responses, can attenuate bias in social judgments by displacing or reducing the need to rely upon social categorization. The Competing Category Application Model (CCAM), a novel model of the effects of expertise on use of social stereotypes in judgment and decision-making, is proposed and tested. The results of three experimental studies provide strong evidence for CCAM. Across the studies, the liability decisions of untrained participants, participants trained on unrelated legal rules, and participants trained on indeterminate legal rules were consistent with the use of social stereotypes. By comparison, such stereotypes did not affect the decisions of trained participants who were applying determinate legal rules. Implications of the results and for future directions are discussed.
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    The (In)egalitarian Self: On the Motivated Rejection of Implicit Racial Bias
    (2016-10) Vitriol, Joseph
    White Americans widely endorse egalitarian values and strongly oppose hostile forms of racial prejudice, yet significant racial disparities persist in many important life domains. Unconscious, implicit forms of bias at the individual-level have been offered as one explanation for aggregate racial disparities. Research has identified strategies to increase prejudice-regulation and reduce implicit bias in applied contexts, but has neglected to consider various psychological obstacles to the successful implementation of these interventions. Across three studies in which I experimentally manipulated exposure to scientific information and personalized feedback about implicit bias, I examined one such obstacle: that evidence of implicit racial bias threatens individuals’ egalitarian self-concepts, and activates motivated reasoning processes that bolster the denial of implicit bias feedback and its influence on behavior. I also test several strategies to decrease defensive responding and attenuate motivated reasoning in this context. Results indicate that exposing White Americans to credible information on the science of implicit bias can increase awareness, but also risks backfire effects in the form of negative attitudes towards social science and increased racial stereotyping. Additionally, personalized implicit bias feedback reliably induced negative attitudes towards an instrument designed to measure implicit bias (i.e., IAT) and negative self-reported affect, but had no reliable influence on awareness. However, negative affect mediated the relationship between feedback and self-perceived bias, suggesting that personalized feedback can have indirect effects on awareness. Importantly, I also obtain robust evidence for the success of a simple pre-feedback intervention informing participants that implicit bias is common and fundamental to human cognition, but nonetheless malleable and subject to control. This collective bias intervention, when paired with personalized feedback, reliably increased self-perceived bias, belief in prejudice and discrimination, and more acceptance of and favorable attitudes towards the IAT. Across all studies, I find that the motivated rejection of implicit bias is consequential for prejudice-regulation, stereotyping, and public policy attitudes, and mediates the relationship between a broad range of individual differences (i.e., sociopolitical orientations, explicit racial attitudes, and egalitarian motivations) and these outcomes. Finally, defensive responding to implicit bias evidence and feedback was cognitively depleting, as indexed by the Stroop test, although impaired performance on this task was reduced among participants in the pre-feedback intervention. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this evidence for anti-bias interventions, models of prejudice-regulation, impression management strategies in the context of intergroup relations, and the study of racial attitudes and prejudice. I also consider the application of my results to political and legal contexts, and identify future directions for additional research.