Social Psychology Commons^™

Cultural Humility When Caring For Lgbtqia+ Older Adults: A Resource Guide For Occupational Therapy Practitioners And Students, Michele Ramos, Deb Meyers, Mary Ann Smith

Spring 2023 Virtual OTD Capstone Symposium

The LGBTQIA+ older adult population has unique needs due to their experience as diverse individuals in a cisgender, heteronormative society. Experiences and effects of discrimination need to be considered when providing care. Occupational therapists have a role in addressing disparities of all marginalized groups, including LGBTQIA+ older adults. Practitioners may utilize cultural humility and trauma-informed practices when treating the LGBTQIA+ population. Existing resources to guide culturally humble occupational therapy care for LGBTQIA+ older adults are insufficient. The purpose of this project was to build on existing cultural humble resources and create a website on the focus of occupational therapy cultural …

How The “Black Criminal” Stereotype Shapes Black People’S Psychological Experience Of Policing: Evidence Of Stereotype Threat And Remaining Questions, Cynthia J. Najdowski

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the U.S. originated in and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers’ perceptions, information processing, and decision-making in ways that produce more negative criminal legal outcomes for Black people than White people. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to understanding how situations that present a risk of being evaluated through the lens of crime-related stereotypes also directly affect Black people. In this article, I consider one situation in particular: encounters …

Reducing Prejudice Through Law: Evidence From Experimental Psychology, Sara Emily Burke, Roseanna Sommers

Articles

Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is legally prohibited cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing the belief that discrimination against a given group is legal (versus illegal) on interpersonal attitudes toward members of that group. We find that learning that discrimination is unlawful does not simply lead people to believe that an employer is more likely …

The Social Psychology Of Inclusion: How Diversity Framing Shapes Outcomes For Racial-Ethnic Minorities, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Research on the efficacy of organizational diversity efforts has yielded mixed results. It remains unclear when positive or negative outcomes should be expected, and why. This article fills a gap in the sociological literature by examining critical social psychological mechanisms. In Experiment 1, I found that common diversity messaging led to increased bias towards racial minorities. In Experiment 2, I examined how alternative framing may influence these outcomes. Findings revealed that the common “business case” emphasizing profit and performance gains made decision-makers less likely to select a Black job candidate than emphasizing civil rights law. I then examined social psychological …

Reducing Prejudice Through Law: Evidence From Experimental Psychology, Roseanna Sommers, Sara Burke

Law & Economics Working Papers

Can antidiscrimination law effect changes in public attitudes toward minority groups? Could learning, for instance, that employment discrimination against people with clinical depression is illegal cause members of the public to be more accepting toward people with mental health conditions? In this Article, we report the results of a series of experiments that test the effect of inducing the belief that discrimination against a given group is legal (vs. illegal) on interpersonal attitudes toward members of that group. We find that learning that discrimination is unlawful does not simply lead people to believe that an employer is more likely to …

Are We Giving Them A Fair Chance? Racial Stereotypes And The Juvenile Justice System, Cali Bloem

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Prior research indicates that there are racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system, including the juvenile justice system, and that decision-makers may use stereotypes when determining guilt and deciding on sentences for juveniles. We used a mock juror study design in which participants were randomly assigned to read one of four trial summaries of an assault committed by either a White juvenile or Latinx juvenile, with the victim being a White juvenile or Latinx juvenile. The participants were asked to provide a verdict and sentencing decision and explain why they chose the sentence that they did. They were also tasked …

Studying The Relationship Between Ethnic Identity And Resiliency: A Broad Approach, Mary Zheng

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Ethnic minorities in the United States face prejudice and racial discrimination, causing feelings of distress. However, ethnic minorities have shown an ability to overcome these negative experiences. Racial identity has been associated with more adjustments and higher functioning for ethnic minorities. To gain a clearer understanding of this phenomenon, we included White people in this study to gain an accurate picture of how resiliency operates differently for people of color and Whites and if it is indeed distinct between the two groups. The purpose of this project is to find and examine the link between ethnic identity and resiliency in …

How Media Impact Race Relations: Positive And Negative Historical Examples And Applied Psychological Principles, Sophia Nocera

Honors Theses

This thesis sought to examine how media influenced interracial relations in the 1920s and 1930s. It starts by defining necessary terms like media, race, racism, and stereotypes. Afterwards, studies which demonstrate that media reflect society are analyzed as well as studies which determine the extent of media influence on society. Media are the most influential on people who agree with the content provided and those who have no specific opinion on the issue at hand.

Next, psychological studies which determine the circumstances in which racist ideology is accepted the most are analyzed. This analysis determined that in-group versus out-group sentiments …

The Predictors Of Juvenile Recidivism: Testimonies Of Adult Students 18 Years And Older Exiting From Alternative Education, La Toshia Palmer

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to identify and describe the importance of the predictors of juvenile recidivism and the effectiveness of efforts to prevent/avoid juvenile recidivism as perceived by previously detained, arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education in Northern California. A second purpose was to explore the types of support provided by alternative schools and the perceived importance of the support to avoid recidivism according to adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education.

Methodology: This qualitative, descriptive research design identified …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Measuring Older Adult Confidence In The Courts And Law Enforcement, Joseph A. Hamm, Lindsey E. Wylie, Eve M. Brank

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Older adults are an increasingly relevant subpopulation for criminal justice policy but, as yet, are largely neglected in the relevant research. The current research addresses this by reporting on a psychometric evaluation of a measure of older adults’ Confidence in Legal Institutions (CLI). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support for the unidimensionality and reliability of the measures. In addition, participants’ CLI was related to cynicism, trust in government, dispositional trust, age, and education, but not income or gender. The results provide support for the measures of confidence in the courts and law enforcement, so we present the scale as a …

Sexual Minority Stigma And System Justification Theory: How Changing The Status Quo Impacts Marriage And Housing Equality, Jordan A. Blenner

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Sexual minorities (i.e. lesbians and gay men) experience systemic discrimination throughout the United States. Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in many states, same-sex couples could not marry and sexual minorities were not protected from sexual orientation housing discrimination (Human Rights Campaign, 2015). The current, two-experiment study applied Jost and Banaji’s (1994) System Justification Theory to marriage and housing discrimination. When sexual minorities question dissimilar treatment, thereby threatening the status quo, members of the heterosexual majority rationalize sexual minority discrimination to maintain their dominant status (Alexander, 2001; Brescoll, Uhlmann, & Newman, 2013; Citizens for Equal …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Incarceration And Reintegration: How It Impacts Mental Health, April M. Marier, Alex Alfredo Reyes

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Background: Previous criminal justice policies have been non-effective leading to overpopulated prisons and unsuccessful reintegration. There is a lack of effective supportive and/or rehabilitative services resulting in high rates of recidivism and mental health implications. Objective: This study investigated the perceived impact that incarceration and reintegration with little to no supportive and/or rehabilitative services has on the mental health status of an individual. The emphasis was on participant perception and not on professional reports because of underreporting and lack of attention to mental health in the criminal justice system. Methods: Focus groups in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

Fear And Projection As Root Causes Of War, And The Archetypal Energies "Trust" And "Peace" As Antidotes, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

I want to use this opportunity to discuss a phenomenon that continues to plague the human experience. It is called the game of war. War is perhaps the deadliest game that humanity has created. The conflict itself represents what appears to be opposing views about the way things should be. Each side believes that it is right and that its actions are justified. Each side therefore seeks to impose its views on the other or to defend its views against the other. Each side fears the other as an enemy and each side projects its fears onto its perceived “enemy.”

Legal Storytelling: The Theory And The Practice - Reflective Writing Across The Curriculum, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

This article concentrates on the theory of narrative or storytelling and addresses the reasons it is vital to encourage in law schools in non-clinical or primarily doctrinal courses. Section I traces the advent of storytelling in legal theory and practice: while lawyers have long recognized that part of their job is to tell their clients' stories, the legal academy was, for many years, resistant to narrative methodologies. Section II examines the current applications of Writing Across the Curriculum in law schools. Most exploratory writing tasks in law school come in clinical courses, although a few adventurous professors are adding reflective …

Theorizing And Litigating The Rights Of Sexual Minorities, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

One of the best measures of a society is how it treats its vulnerable groups. A central idea in Professor Martha Nussbaum's writings is that all humans "are of equal dignity and worth, no matter where they are situated in society." The strategic challenge in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) rights litigation is how to get courts to see sexual minorities as people worthy of equal dignity and respect. This article focuses on the roles of a positive emotion - love - and a procedural method of proof - science - in the shaping of laws defining the rights …

Diabolical Frivolity Of Neoliberal Fundamentalism, Sefik Tatlic

Sefik Tatlic

Today, we cannot talk just about plain control, but we must talk about the nature of the interaction of the one who is being controlled and the one who controls, an interaction where the one that is “controlled” is asking for more control over himself/herself while expecting to be compensated by a surplus of freedom to satisfy trivial needs and wishes. Such a liberty for the fulfillment of trivial needs is being declared as freedom. But this implies as well the freedom to choose not to be engaged in any kind of socially sensible or politically articulated struggle.

Stereotype Threat: A Case Of Overclaim Syndrome?, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

The theory of Stereotype Threat (ST) predicts that, when widely accepted stereotypes allege a group’s intellectual inferiority, fears of confirming these stereotypes cause individuals in the group to underperform relative to their true ability and knowledge. There are now hundreds of published studies purporting to document an impact for ST on the performance of women and racial minorities in a range of situations. This article reviews the literature on stereotype threat, focusing especially on studies investigating the influence of ST in the context of gender. It concludes that there is currently no justification for concluding that ST explains women’s underperformance …

Strong Claims And Weak Evidence: Reassessing The Predictive Validity Of The Iat, Hart Blanton, James Jaccard, Jonathan Klick, Barbara Mellers, Gregory Mitchell, Philip Tetlock

All Faculty Scholarship

The authors reanalyzed data from 2 influential studies — A. R. McConnell and J. M. Leibold (2001) and J. C. Ziegert and P. J. Hanges (2005) — that explore links between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior and that have been invoked to support strong claims about the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test. In both of these studies, the inclusion of race Implicit Association Test scores in regression models reduced prediction errors by only tiny amounts, and Implicit Association Test scores did not permit prediction of individual-level behaviors. Furthermore, the results were not robust when the impact of rater …

The Discriminating Mind: Define It, Prove It, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

Differential group achievements in competitive spheres like business, government, and academia, in conjunction with professed organizational commitments to fairness and equal opportunity, fuel claims that unconscious discrimination operates widely in society today. But attempts to blame disparities by race or sex on inadvertent bias must be approached with caution in the current climate. Many allegations concerning unconscious discrimination do not properly allege category-based treatment at all but rather target the disparate impact, or differential effects, of category-neutral criteria. Such impacts often reflect welldocumented “supply side” disparities between groups in human capital development, qualifications, and behavior. These patterns are not most …

Happy Law Students, Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit, Douglas Linder

Nancy Levit

This article draws on research into the science of happiness and asks a series of interrelated questions: Whether law schools can make law students happier? Whether making happier law students will translate into making them happier lawyers, and the accompanying question of whether making law students happier would create better lawyers? After covering the limitations of genetic determinants of happiness and happiness set-points, the article addresses those qualities that happiness research indicates are paramount in creating satisfaction: control, connections, creative challenge (or flow), and comparisons (preferably downward). Those qualities are then applied to legal education, while addressing the larger philosophical …

Mega-Cases, Diversity, And The Elusive Goal Of Workplace Reform, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

Employment discrimination class action suits are part of a new wave of structural reform litigation. Like their predecessors - the school desegregation cases in the 1950s, the housing and voting inequalities cases in the 1960s, prison conditions suits in the 1970s, and environmental lawsuits since then - these are systemic challenges to major institutions affecting large segments of the public. This article explores the effectiveness of various employment discrimination remedies in reforming workplace cultures, promoting corporate accountability, and implementing real diversity.

Reviewing the architecture and aftermath of consent decrees in five major employment discrimination cases - the cases against Shoney's, …

Calling For Stories, Nancy Levit, Allen Rostron

Nancy Levit

Storytelling is a fundamental part of legal practice, teaching, and thought. Telling stories as a method of practicing law reaches back to the days of the classical Greek orators. Before legal education became an academic matter, the apprenticeship system for training lawyers consisted of mentoring and telling war stories. As the law and literature movement evolved, it sorted itself into three strands: law in literature, law as literature, and storytelling. The storytelling branch blossomed.

Over the last few decades, storytelling became a subject of enormous interest and controversy within the world of legal scholarship. Law review articles appeared in the …

Confronting Conventional Thinking: The Heuristics Problem In Feminist Legal Theory, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

The thesis of The Heuristics Problem is that the societal problems about which identity theorists are most concerned often spring from and are reinforced by thinking riddled with heuristic errors. This article first investigates the ways heuristic errors influence popular perceptions of feminist issues. Feminists and critical race theorists have explored the cognitive bias of stereotyping, but have not examined the ways probabilistic errors can have gendered consequences. Second, The Heuristics Problem traces some of the ways cognitive errors have influenced the development of laws relating to gender issues. It explores instances in judicial decisions in which courts commit heuristic …

Embracing Segregation: The Jurisprudence Of Choice And Diversity In Race And Sex Separatism In Schools, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, segregation based on race and sex is sweeping the nation's educational systems. Courts are rapidly dismantling desegregation orders, and when those desegregation orders end, school districts racially resegregate. At precisely the same time this end to racial desegregation is occurring, the government is beginning to sponsor sex segregation in schools as well. The No Child Left Behind Act provides over $400 million in federal funds for experiments in education, such as single-sex schools and classes. Embracing Segregation draws connections between the end of racial desegregation and the beginning of government-sponsored sex segregation …

Theorizing The Connections Among Systems Of Subordination, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

Theorizing the Connections Among Systems of Subordination introduces a symposium that addresses issues on the leading edge of identity theory, race theory, and critical social theory. It explains the concepts of anti-essentialism, intersectionality, multiple consciousness, multi-dimensionality, and post-intersectionality. It investigates the ways specific types of oppression - such as racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia - support and feed off of one another. It explores the dynamics of subordination that make different forms of subordination connected to each other - the mechanisms by which subordinating systems buttress each other. Where one sees sexism, one frequently can find racism; where classism exists, …

Keeping Feminism In Its Place: Sex Segregation And The Domestication Of Female Academics, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

The thesis of Keeping Feminism in Its Place is that women are being "domesticated" in the legal academy. This occurs in two ways, one theoretical and one very practical: denigration of feminism on the theoretical level and sex segregation of men and women on the experiential level intertwine to disadvantage women in academia in complex and subtle ways.

The article examines occupational sex segregation and role differentiation between male and female law professors, demonstrating statistically that in legal academia, women are congregated in lower-ranking, lower-paying, lower-prestige positions. It also traces how segregation by sex persists in substantive course teaching assignments. …

A Different Kind Of Sameness: Beyond Formal Equality And Antisubordination Principles In Gay Legal Theory And Constitutional Doctrine, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

Gay legal theory is at a crossroads reminiscent of the sameness/difference debate in feminist circles and the integrationist debate in critical race theory. Formal equality theorists take the heterosexual model as the norm and then seek to show that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals - except for their choice of partners - are just like heterosexuals. Antisubordination theorists attack the heterosexual model itself and seek to show that a society that insists on such a model is unjust. Neither of these strategies is wholly satisfactory. The formal equality model will fail to bring about fundamental reforms as long as sexual …