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
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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
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2022-05
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Since 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.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.May 2022. Major: Psychology. Advisors: Christopher Federico, Marti Gonzales. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 128 pages.
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Aguilera, Rafael. (2022). 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. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241289.
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