Eric D. Knowles

White selves: conceptualizing and measuring a dominant-group identity.

This article addresses the nature and measurement of White racial identity. White identification is conceptualized as an automatic association between the self and the White ingroup; this association is fostered through social exposure to non-Whites and serves to link self- and ingroup evaluations. Four studies validated a measure of White identification against criteria derived from this model. In Study 1, the White Identity Centrality Implicit Association Test (WICIAT) predicted response latencies in a task gauging self-ingroup merging. In Study 2, the WICIAT correlated with census data tapping exposure to non-Whites. In Studies 3 and 4, the WICIAT predicted phenomena associated with the linking of self- and ingroup evaluations: identity-related biases in intergroup categorization (Study 3) and self-evaluative emotional reactions to ingroup transgressions (Study 4). Together, the findings shed light on the antecedents and consequences of White identity, an often-neglected individual difference construct.

Culture and the Process of Person Perception: Evidence for Automaticity among East Asians in Correcting for Situational Influences on Behavior:

The authors evaluate three models of the cognitive processes underlying person perception (i.e., the processes perceivers use to judge whether an actor’s behavior reflects a personal disposition), each of which implies a different way in which culturally instilled lay theories of behavior affect attributions. The models make distinctive predictions concerning how cognitive busyness will affect dispositional inference among members of different cultures. To test the models, the authors compared attributions of U.S. and Hong Kong perceivers for an expressive act under conditions of high and low cognitive busyness. Whereas cognitive busyness increased dispositionism among U.S. participants, it did not for Hong Kong participants. Findings from numerous measures combine to support the automatized situational correction model, which posits that holders of a situation-based lay theory of behavior (such as members of Chinese culture) have automatized the ability to correct attributions to personal dispositions to take into account situational influences.

Deny, Distance, or Dismantle? How White Americans Manage a Privileged Identity

Social scientists have traditionally argued that whiteness—the attribute of being recognized and treated as a White person in society—is powerful because it is invisible. On this view, members of the racially dominant group have the unique luxury of rarely noticing their race or the privileges it confers. This article challenges this “invisibility thesis,” arguing that Whites frequently regard themselves as racial actors. We further argue that whiteness defines a problematic social identity that confronts Whites with 2 psychological threats: the possibility that their accomplishments in life were not fully earned (meritocratic threat) and the association with a group that benefits from unfair social advantages (group-image threat). We theorize that Whites manage their racial identity to dispel these threats. According to our deny, distance, or dismantle (3D) model of White identity management, dominant-group members have three strategies at their disposal: deny the existence of privilege, distance their own self-concepts from the White category, or strive to dismantle systems of privilege. Whereas denial and distancing promote insensitivity and inaction with respect to racial inequality, dismantling reduces threat by relinquishing privileges. We suggest that interventions aimed at reducing inequality should attempt to leverage dismantling as a strategy of White identity management.

Diversity is what you want it to be: how social-dominance motives affect construals of diversity.

We propose that diversity is a malleable concept capable of being used either to attenuate or to enhance racial inequality. The research reported here suggests that when people are exposed to ambiguous information concerning an organization’s diversity, they construe diversity in a manner consistent with their social-dominance motives. Specifically, anti-egalitarian individuals broaden their construal of diversity to include nonracial (i.e., occupational) heterogeneity when an organization’s racial heterogeneity is low. By contrast, egalitarian individuals broaden their construal of diversity to include nonracial heterogeneity when an organization’s racial heterogeneity is high. The inclusion of occupational heterogeneity in perceptions of diversity allows people across the spectrum of social-dominance orientation to justify their support for or opposition to hierarchy-attenuating affirmative-action policies. Our findings suggest that diversity may not have a fixed meaning and that, without a specific delineation of what the concept means in particular contexts, people may construe diversity in a manner consistent with their social motivations.

Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings Evidence From Visual Attention

We theorize that people’s social class affects their appraisals of others’ motivational relevance—the degree to which others are seen as potentially rewarding, threatening, or otherwise worth attending to. Supporting this account, three studies indicate that social classes differ in the amount of attention their members direct toward other human beings. In Study 1, wearable technology was used to film the visual fields of pedestrians on city streets; higher-class participants looked less at other people than did lower-class participants. In Studies 2a and 2b, participants’ eye movements were tracked while they viewed street scenes; higher class was associated with reduced attention to people in the images. In Study 3, a change-detection procedure assessed the degree to which human faces spontaneously attract visual attention; faces proved less effective at drawing the attention of high-class than low-class participants, which implies that class affects spontaneous relevance appraisals. The measurement and conceptualization of social class are discussed.

Race, Ideology, and the Tea Party: A Longitudinal Study

The Tea Party movement, which rose to prominence in the United States after the election of President Barack Obama, provides an ideal context in which to examine the roles of racial concerns and ideology in politics. A three-wave longitudinal study tracked changes in White Americans’ self-identification with the Tea Party, racial concerns (prejudice and racial identification), and ideologies (libertarianism and social conservatism) over nine months. Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) was used to evaluate potential causal relationships between Tea Party identification and these factors. Across time points, racial prejudice was indirectly associated with movement identification through Whites’ assertions of national decline. Although initial levels of White identity did not predict change in Tea Party identification, initial levels of Tea Party identification predicted increases in White identity over the study period. Across the three assessments, support for the Tea Party fell among libertarians, but rose among social conservatives. Results are discussed in terms of legitimation theories of prejudice, the “racializing” power of political judgments, and the ideological dynamics of the Tea Party.

Incentivizing Wellness in the Workplace Sticks (Not Carrots) Send Stigmatizing Signals

Companies often provide incentives for employees to maintain healthy lifestyles. These incentives can take the form of either discounted premiums for healthy-weight employees (“carrot” policies) or increased premiums for overweight employees (“stick” policies). In the three studies reported here, we demonstrated that even when stick and carrot policies are formally equivalent, they do not necessarily convey the same information to employees. Stick but not carrot policies were viewed as reflecting negative company attitudes toward overweight employees (Study 1a) and were evaluated especially negatively by overweight participants (Study 1b). This was true even when overweight employees paid less money under the stick than under the carrot policy. When acting as policymakers (Study 2), participants with high levels of implicit overweight bias were especially likely to choose stick policies—often on the grounds that such policies were cost-effective—even when doing so was more costly to the company. Policymakers should realize that the framing of incentive programs can convey tacit, and sometimes stigmatizing, messages.

Taking Race Off the Table Agenda Setting and Support for Color-Blind Public Policy

Whites are theorized to support color-blind policies as an act of racial agenda setting—an attempt to defend the existing hierarchy by excluding race from public and institutional discourse. The present analysis leverages work distinguishing between two forms of social dominance orientation (SDO): passive opposition to equality (SDO-E) and active desire for dominance (SDO-D). We hypothesized that agenda setting, as a subtle hierarchy-maintenance strategy, would be uniquely tied to high levels of SDO-E. When made to believe that the hierarchy was under threat, Whites high in SDO-E increased their endorsement of color-blind policy (Study 1), particularly when the racial hierarchy was framed as ingroup advantage (Study 2), and became less willing to include race as a topic in a hypothetical presidential debate (Study 3). Across studies, Whites high in SDO-D showed no affinity for agenda setting as a hierarchy-maintenance strategy.

Intentional Sin and Accidental Virtue? Cultural Differences in Moral Systems Influence Perceived Intentionality

Indians and U.S. Americans view harmful actions as morally wrong, but Indians are more likely than U.S. Americans to perceive helping behaviors as moral imperatives. We utilize this cultural variability in moral belief systems to test whether and how moral considerations influence perceptions of intentionality (as suggested by theories of folk psychology). Four experiments found that Indians attribute more intentionality than U.S. Americans for helpful but not harmful (Studies 1–4) or neutral side effects (Studies 2 and 3). Also, cross-cultural differences in intentionality judgments for positive actions reflect stronger praise motives (Study 3), and stronger devotion to religious beliefs and practices among Hindus (Study 4). These results provide the first direct support for the claim that features of moral belief systems influence folk psychology, and further suggest that the influence is not inherently asymmetrical; motivation to either blame or praise can influence judgments of intentionality.

Understanding White Identity Politics Will Be Crucial to Diversity Science

In her target article, Victoria Plaut (this issue) makes the case for the inception of a “diversity science” for the 21st century. This science would dedicate itself to understanding how individuals from diverse backgrounds can coexist productively, harmoniously, and in a manner conducive to individual well-being. At first glance, diversity science might appear to duplicate the goals of traditional research into intergroup relations. However, such an interpretation does not do justice to Plaut’s important proposal. Unlike most social-psychological treatments of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, diversity science treats intergroup relations as sociocultural phenomena in which “cultural and structural realities (i.e., cultural beliefs and social positioning)” shape the manner in which groups relate to one another (Plaut, this issue). Diversity science’s emphasis on sociocultural processes sets up another crucial (and rather “meta”) theme: that to understand diversity, one must understand how people understand diversity. As such, diversity science seeks to know how culturally shared and structurally shaped models of “what difference is and whether and how it matters” determine intergroup behavior (Plaut, this issue, p. 93). We fully support Plaut’s broad and synthetic approach to understanding diversity, and in this commentary we seek to expand on one of the issues she identifies as essential to diversity science: Whites as racial actors.