Jordan Starck | Making the Medicine Go Down: Situated Interventions to Improve Racial Inequality

Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium

Social psychology has increasingly realized the need to think and act structurally to understand and address pressing social issues like racism, and recent work has demonstrated that even our best single shot bias reduction interventions may only produce fleeting effects. Interventions integrated into institutions or the broader culture that people interact with everyday have the opportunity to treat individuals and their environments on an ongoing basis. I present empirical findings from two lines of work investigating the potential and pitfalls associated with these situated interventions: improving racial representation in televisual media and organizational diversity commitments. Employing a new technique to study how features of Black characters' representation affect White audiences, we find that certain elements of Black characters' representations cause both expected and unexpected consequences and can also produce nuanced positive effects. However, we also find that the mere depiction of Black characters on a show's thumbnail image drives White viewers away. Similarly, we find that organizations committing to diversity as a matter of moral principle creates organizational environments that facilitate Black Americans' belonging, identity-safety, and thriving. However, White Americans find such commitments aversive and, accordingly, increasingly support calls for such commitments to be banned. Together, these research programs demonstrate how people may avoid or reject features of an environment put in place to improve racial inequality, and I explore possible ways for addressing this challenge.