Research overview

Our research program is rooted in two underlying principles. The first is that a dynamic understanding of intergroup relations requires an examination of individual differences amongst the members within each group. This point is especially pertinent when groups are embedded in a socio-political context where status inequality helps to define group membership (e.g. race relations in America). Although members of stigmatized groups are subjected to similar identity contingencies, their perceptions and attitudes about those contingencies can lead to predictably different behaviors. Our research elevates this focus area in order to expand our understanding of intergroup relations beyond the more common study of individual differences amongst dominant group members.

Preferences for group inequality

How do people differ in their preferences for group inequality? Historically, psychological research has focused on understanding the attitudes of majority group members, and how they impact minority group members. Our lab takes a different approach: we analyze minority group members’ preferences for group inequality and how this impacts their attitudes towards 1) majority groups, 2) their own minority group, 3) other minority groups, and 4) social institutions.

Between-group preferences

People endorse the idea that racial groups are stratified in a status hierarchy wherein some races have more advantages in society than others (Zou, 2017). As well, people differ in their preferences for inequality between groups; this preference is typically aligned with their group’s status position, which then has implications for the way they behave toward members of other groups (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Given this, it is no surprise that members of racial groups that are differentially positioned will report experiencing prejudice to differing degrees in their daily lives (Lee, Perez, Boykin, & Mendoza-Denton, 2019).

One measure taken against this prejudice was the establishment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). HBCUs were founded to give Black people, and other marginalized groups, the opportunity to raise their status position in society (Duster, 2009) and help combat social inequality. Lee and Keys (2013) have shown that in many states, public land grant institutions of higher education (i.e., those institutions that were founded in response to the 1862 and 1890 Morrill Land Grant Acts) are unequally funded: while properly funding their Historically White Institution (HWI), states fail to honor their constitutional fund matching obligations and underfund their state’s historically Black land grant institutions. Relatedly, and consistent with research by Craig and Richeson (2014), when Whites are shown information about changing majority-minority demographics in the United States, they exhibit more negative attitudes toward HBCUs and endorse greater inequality in public funding for HBCUs relative to HWIs. We argue that through these attitudes toward racialized institutions and physical spaces (Bonam, Taylor, Yantis, 2017), Whites manifest their subjective attitudes toward objective inequality and effectively alter the physical (and educational) environments that marginalized groups occupy (Mendoza-Denton and Mishcel, 2007; Boykin, Martin, & Mendoza-Denton, in revision).

Within-group preferences

While preferences for group inequality are studied extensively within society’s majority groups, less is known about the meaning of these preferences within minority groups (Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin, 2006). In the United States, Black people tend to have lower amounts of preference for group inequality than Whites (Ho et. al., 2015); however, there is still systematic variation among Black people’s preferences that could have implications for intergroup and intragroup behavior. Our work supports that these preferences are related to Black racial identity attitudes across multiple dimensions, as measured by the Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS) (Boykin, Martin, Jones, Worrell, Mendoza-Denton, in revision). Further, preferences for group hierarchy among Black people strongly predicts endorsements of negative stereotypes about HBCUs (Boykin, Martin, & Mendoza-Denton, in revision), highlighting the potential that these preferences lead Black individuals to devalue policies and interventions that support Black upward mobility and collective action.

Current and future directions

In measuring negative stereotypes about HBCUs, our lab has developed and validated the HBCU Stereotype Scale (HBCU-SS). This construct provides a myriad of opportunities to seek better psychological understanding of phenomena related to adolescent college choices, alumni giving behaviors, within- and cross-group hiring decisions, and endorsements of policy decisions. Further, our work demonstrates that Black identity, as measured by the CRIS subscales, is potentially a complex intervening process between hierarchy orientation and HBCU stereotyping. We are now examining whether this model can predict Black individuals attitudes towards several other institutions, policies, and interventions that promote equality. This model could foster a more nuanced understanding of ways in which racial attitudes, predicted by perspectives of group hierarchy, can be used together as a predictive tool to estimate various outcomes, such as differential engagement with organizational policy, personal health and wellness management, social policy, commercial products, and many others. Additionally, this model can be used to examine the relationships between racial identity attitudes and preferences for hierarchy across other minority groups in the U.S., as well as in minority groups in non-Western nations and political contexts.

Perceptions of group inequality

We use standardized tests and performance evaluations as grounds for examining how society maintains and legitimizes inequalities between groups. While material differences exist between groups, people ascribe distinct meanings to these differences, and it is these ascribed meanings that illuminate how they are wielded to either support or subvert inequality. In job settings, standardized assessments and performance evaluations are used to guide promotions and developmental feedback that could inform future performance. In education, assessments are often used to justify promoting students or to rationalize tracking them toward exclusive education opportunities. Our work investigates processes by which performance assessments can become biased, as well as systematic patterns in people’s narratives about data from standardized tests and what they can tell us about inequality.

Heritability and cognitive ability

Historically, standardized assessments were designed to measure an unobservable, theoretically fixed, and biologically determined amount of intellective ability within an individual to understand their ranking relative to other individuals (Jensen, 1986; Lewinton, 1993). While these interpretations are still somewhat in vogue (Plomin, 2018), recent findings in psychology and genetics have complicated or even this interpretation. For example, the correlation between (1) the polygenic risk scores (expressed genes) that are espoused to cause higher cognitive ability and (2) the ability scores they are supposed to cause explain seven times more variance in White genomes (10.5%) than in Black ones (1.5%) (Lee, et. al. 2018). In essence, these models predict cognitive ability reasonably well for White people, but these exact same genes have less meaning for explaining cognitive ability scores in Black people. Equally important, systematic standardized testing preparation using resources such as the Khan Academy and other technology have been exhibited to have substantial effects on score outcomes (College Board, 2018; Boykin, in press). Taken together, these findings highlight the possibility that social position qualifies the link between heritability and performance on these malleable measures of cognitive ability.

Biases in performance evaluations

My research explores contexts that matter to performance at macro and micro levels. In recent work, we demonstrate that individual differences in motivations to control prejudice can bias the feedback Whites give to Black and Latino persons during a face-to-face evaluation of performance (Boykin & Smith, in press). Thus, subjective performance evaluations can be influenced by the attitudes of the evaluator even when objective performance is held constant. Furthermore, for members of marginalized groups, having positive relationships with the individuals who will evaluate their performance and guide their growth has beneficial impact on performance (Leitner, Ayduk, Boykin, & Mendoza-Denton, 2019; Boykin, Patt, & Mendoza-Denton, 2015).

Current and future directions

In a recent book review of Plomin’s treatise on behavioral genetics, Brandon Ogbunu and I (August 1, 2019) highlighted that the predictive power of the exact same set of locations on the human genome varies by the GDP of the nation the genome comes from. Similarly, and in tighter proximity, the heritability of physical height shifts on a gradient from West to East in Finaland (Kerminen et. al., 2019). Making use of this growing literature that establishes ways in which the environment bends heritability, we are exploring whether genes by environment interaction estimates differ by racial and ethnic group social stratification. This opens an exciting direction of work, given how closely this research is tied to how the field of psychology conceptualizes individual and group differences. Our research on behavioral genetics will be coupled with a parallel stream of research designed to uncover people’s subjective theories about heritability. We are presently designing a psychological dependent variable measure that will consist of two graphic normal curves that participants can slide along the x-axis to create a greater or lesser overlap between the distributions (similar to Aron, Aron, and Smollan’s 1992 inclusion of other in the self). This will allow us to gain insights into participants’ estimations of how much certain groups (e.g. racial or ethnic) differ on complex outcomes. Furthermore, our research will show how preferences for inequality or perceptions of group status may inform estimates of group difference across various dimensions (e.g. IQ or SAT verbal score). Ultimately, this measure may help us explain if, when, and how attitudes about group differences in ability or perspectives of heritability are used to preserve group inequality.