- All right, so today I want to talk
about some of the research that I've been doing
in collaboration with my former student.
She just, she finished it a couple of years ago,
Julia Tran, on intergroup relations
and sort of the psychology of protesting racism.
We've seen a lot of protests over the last year or so,
a lot of work in anti-racism,
but you know, this has a very long history of protest,
and so we'll get into some of that, as well.
And what I want to do today is describe
just a couple of theories of intergroup relations
that help to guide research
in understanding this behavior of protest,
so I'll start with that,
and then we'll go into a couple of studies that we've done
examining both white Americans' willingness to protest,
but also African Americans that we've studied, all right?
So, so yeah, so we've had widespread protests
over the past year.
Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd,
and lots of calls, probably in all of our institutions,
for racial justice, racial equity, so on and so forth.
But, you know, this is not a sort of a new phenomenon.
Protest is ubiquitous, not only in the United States,
but around the world and across history.
And so we'll go ahead and talk about this.
So one of the theories of intergroup relations
that help to understand why people engage
in particular behaviors like protest
or why they discriminate against other group members
is social dominance theory.
Now, this is a very complex theory
and I don't have a lot of time,
but we'll go through just sort of
the skeleton of the theory.
And what it argues is that inequality,
humans tend to organize themselves
in terms of these group-based social hierarchies,
and there's three kinds.
There's a gender-based hierarchy
that's ubiquitous across cultures and across time,
where men have more power than women
and gender minorities everywhere.
There's an age-based hierarchy.
This one's less controversial,
where, like, adults have more power
everywhere than children do.
And then there are these culturally-specific hierarchies
that sort of emerge,
and all of these groups are sort of ranked
in terms of different forms of domains of power.
For example, education, health, income,
all of those different sites of inequality.
So this theory really tries to understand
the ubiquity of that inequality,
and we'll just sort of highlight the individual level.
There's more levels of analysis, but at its source,
because there's inequalities ubiquitous
for human societies, people have,
like, an attitude toward it.
They have an orientation toward it,
and this is called a social dominance orientation.
So some people really like inequality between groups,
and this, so dominant group members in particular
are higher on social dominance orientation,
and disadvantaged group members are sort of lower on it.
They prefer equal group relations.
What this orientation does
is it leads people to adopt particular ideological beliefs
that serve one of two purposes.
An ideological belief can be hierarchy-enhancing.
That mean its aim is to increase inequality between groups,
so these are things like racism, sexism, heterosexism,
those sorts of things.
But for people low on social dominance orientation,
they're going to endorse ideologies that reduce inequality.
These are things like anti-racism, feminism, you know,
a bunch of those other sorts of beliefs.
These ideologies help to provide the justification
for engaging in different types of behaviors,
intergroup behaviors.
Hierarchy-enhancing ones lead to discrimination.
People use those ideologies
to justify discriminating against low power groups,
and then also these other ideologies,
anti-racism, feminism, you know, motivates somebody
to engage in protest to challenge that inequality.
And it's really the counterbalancing of these two forces
in society that maintain inequality
at sort of a stable level
across all of these different domains.
So this theory really highlights
this sort of motivation for groups to be dominant,
but also to be inclusive,
and also highlights the importance
of these ideological beliefs
in promoting each of these different behaviors.
The other theory that guides a lot of research in protest
in particular is social identity theory.
So we all have social identities,
and we can vary to the extent to which we feel connection
to those different groups.
So I can categorize myself, for example,
I'm a Asian American,
I can categorize myself as an Asian American,
and then I can say, oh, I identify with that group
or I feel strong connection to other Asian-Americans.
What that does is it orients us toward the disadvantage
that certain minority groups have.
So if I'm thinking about myself
in terms of being an Asian American, then I can start to,
I'm more aware of the disadvantage
that the group sort of experiences in society.
And so, because of that disadvantage,
I have sort of two ways of coping
with that disadvantage.
There's two pathways,
there's an emotion-focused coping pathway
and a problem-focused coping pathway.
So in the emotion-focused one,
the first thing that I'm gonna do is start to blame
an external entity for my disadvantage.
So if I'm not blaming myself, I'm gonna be blaming,
for example, social structures, institutions,
dominant group members, you know, those sorts of things.
I can also look for at in terms of problem-focused coping,
I can look for social support,
so other people in my community,
I can go to them for social support.
And these two sort of primary appraisals
lead to experiences of anger.
If somebody else is doing this to me,
is the source of my disadvantage,
I'm gonna experience a great deal of anger.
And with social support,
if a lot of people in my community who support me,
I'm gonna feel more efficacy,
the capability that I can do something about
sort of this disadvantage.
And it turns out that these two pathways
lead to protest behavior,
this combination of feeling intense anger
and feeling like you can do something about it
leads to protest behaviors.
Now, this theory was primarily developed
for disadvantaged group members,
so people of color, for example, women, so on and so forth,
sexual minorities.
And social dominance theory is really only looked at
among dominant group members, so white Americans, men,
heterosexual people, so on and so forth.
And so what we've done in our research
has really tried to understand how, you know,
when you use one theory for a particular group member,
for powerful group members, and using another theory
for understanding the psychology
of sort of disadvantaged group members.
So the first study that I want to highlight here
is about protesting racial hierarchy,
looking at white Americans' protest motivations.
So in this study, we got about almost 400 white Americans
through a crowdsourcing website,
and we measured a bunch of these sort of variables,
testing the social dominance theory model.
So we have a measure of social dominance orientation,
a measure of anti-racism.
So some white Americans might have egalitarian,
more egalitarian orientation toward groups
that leads them to adopt anti-racism.
And then we have measures of efficacy,
anger, and collective action, willingness.
And so if we analyze this in sort of a model
similar to the theoretical model up above,
we do find support for the importance
of these sort of egalitarian or group dominance motivations
contributing to people's adoption of anti-racist beliefs
or racist beliefs, on the flip side.
And both of those contribute to feelings of efficacy,
anger for these white Americans,
and it leads them to want to protest
in support of racial equality, all right,
and different sort of social movements.
All right, so that's just showing really quickly
sort of the utility of using social dominance theory
to understand dominant group members' protest willingness.
So we also have, there's also a long,
like I mentioned before, there's a long history
of African American activism in the United States,
and this next project, this next study that we did,
really focused on this concept of respectability politics,
which was really highlighted in this book
by this historian, Evelyn Higginbotham,
where she examined sort of the women's movement
in the black Baptist church,
sort of in the Reconstruction era
in the United States.
And so what she argued was that this respectability politics
really started as a way to signify self-esteem
and racial pride for African Americans,
African American women.
And what it allowed for them to do
is to sort of claim or sort of affirm
African Americans' sort of sense of dignity.
That was grounded in their particular faith
and in their connection to God
in the Christian faith.
At this time, there was a lot of stereotyping,
a lot of, you know, hostility, lynching sort of things,
sort of after the Civil War,
and so this ideology really started,
was really radical at the time,
sort of an assertion that black people are, you know,
have dignity, have something,
should have pride in who they are,
and that this sense of pride
came from their relationship to God.
Now, you might've heard some of this discourse.
So it really started off as sort of a radical sort of idea,
but it's really transformed over the last 150 years.
So there was a focus on for these African American women
in the black Baptist church that focused on professionalism,
demonstrating competence, reliability, hard work.
There was also a focus on being pious
and having a dignified life,
so that means dressing well, you know,
showing proper etiquette, manners, having a clean home,
all of these sorts of things.
Now today, this sort of respectability politics
is not as radical.
'Cause it's sort of been co-opted over time,
and you might've heard some African Americans
sort of comment on, you know, don't wear saggy pants,
you know, those, social things.
And it's been criticized as sort of a way
for African Americans to sort of conform to white standards
of, you know, of proper behavior, so on and so forth.
So we wanted to look at that social identity theory model,
but incorporate this respectability politics,
'cause today it might orient people
away from the external blame
that they might otherwise sort of go for, okay?
So what we did was we had 208 African-Americans,
average age of 46 years old, and, you know,
we measured all of those things from the model up above.
So we measured their sense of connection
to other African-Americans.
We created a new measure for respectability politics,
basically focusing on those things
like manners and dressing well and things like that.
We also measured their sense of efficacy about this anger,
and we also measured their protest for particular,
a bunch of different sort of causes.
One, just the general racial equality.
Another one, reparations for African Americans.
And then the last one was about
focused on housing and affordable housing.
And then we have a lot of other things
that we sort of included in this,
'cause we wanted to test the full model,
so the next thing I'm gonna show you
is really complex and complicated.
It's really, really big, (laughs)
but really what it shows is that we did find support
for this social identity approach,
where these African American participants
who felt a connection to their group
really did start to blame sort of external entities
for the disadvantage,
and they also sought out both emotional
and instrumental social support from their communities.
These then led to experiences of group-based anger
at their disadvantaged senses of efficacy,
that they could actually do something about it,
and then all of that contributed to activism
for racial equality, activism for reparations
and less clear but somewhat,
activism for affordable housing.
The interesting case here was the role
of respectability politics over on the left side.
And whenever these African American participants
endorsed that,
it didn't have any really any relationships
with the other ones, but it was sort of,
it did sort of interact with this sort of external blame.
So let me just go to that real quickly.
And so you can see that the darker dotted line
that's sort of going in an upward trend,
that is participants who were sort of low
on respectability politics.
That means they did not agree that these,
that African Americans should be dressing well
and conforming and all those sorts of things.
For them, this external blame started to predict
their activism behaviors.
Now, if they were high in respectability politics,
that sort of reduced the influence of external blame
on sort of the activism for racial equality.
So even though this respectability politics a long time ago
was a radical sort of assertion
of African Americans' sort of dignity
and their sort of self-worth,
nowadays it's sort of seen in the opposite way
as a way of conforming to white culture
and blaming African Americans for their,
and problems within the community
for their own disadvantage.
So real quick, just a couple of conclusions.
We found that white Americans' protest is grounded
in this general egalitarianism and anti-racist beliefs,
and those contribute to feelings of anger and efficacy,
which then drives their protest.
Now, African Americans' activism stems from, you know,
their ingroup identification,
which contributes to those two coping processes,
leading to anger and efficacy, and then to activism.
And these historical ideologies,
respectability politics today, they orient African Americans
away from social structural determinants of disadvantage,
and it diminishes their activism.
And then, you know, the final takeaway
is that these ideologies are really important for protest,
even whenever they sort of transform over time
from radical self-care to beliefs in conforming
to white cultural standards.
So, that was a lot information.
It was really quick, and there's a lot more to talk about,
but thank you all so much for today.