Psychophysiological Responses Among White Liberals to Discussing Race and Privilege

Abstract

Discussing race, racism, and privilege appears to be uncomfortable for many White individuals, as evidenced by a range of defensive emotional and behavioral responses. Understanding what leads to these reactions will be critical for interrupting and reshaping them. In this dissertation, I propose that physiological stress responses (e.g., fight-flight-freeze) may be a key uninvestigated component of defensive White reactions to critical race conversations. For this study, I employed an experimental design to test whether being randomly assigned to discuss race in a social evaluative context elicited more pronounced physiological and affective discomfort responses than in an active control condition. Physiological output measures indexing activity of both the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and autonomic nervous system were collected across the experimental session and compared across treatment and control groups. Forty-two White, liberal emerging adults (33 female) participated in this study from March 2021 through April 2022. Overall, results suggested that discussing race and privilege in a socially evaluative context does elicit race-specific social evaluation concerns (i.e., concern of looking like a bad person and looking racist). However, neither physiological stress reactivity nor affective discomfort was significantly elevated in the group discussing race and privilege. In fact, physiological responses were minimal across the full sample. However, a significant interaction was found between treatment group and affective discomfort when looking at RSA reactivity to the speech. Participants that gave a speech about race and reported moderately low affective discomfort also displayed greater parasympathetic nervous system activation during the speech. Future analyses will explore hypotheses using qualitative analyses of video-recordings and transcripts from the session. More work is needed with a more diverse sample of White individuals (e.g., across age, socioeconomic status, ideology) as well as under more ecologically valid scenarios.