February 16, 2024
Linda Blaser
Journal publishes bias concerns paper co-written by Emily Dix
A scholarly paper co-written by Assistant Professor of Psychology Emily Dix has been published in the January 2024 issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Dix co-wrote “It’s not an overreaction: Increasing White people’s acceptance of the reality of bias and receptivity to Black people’s bias concerns” with Patricia Devine, Kenneth and Mamie Clark Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
About the paper, Dix wrote: “Despite substantial evidence of ongoing racial bias in the US, it is well-documented that White people tend to dismiss Black people’s legitimate concerns about the bias they experience. That’s the problem that motivated this research. We developed and tested an educational intervention that helps White people recognize that bias occurs more often than they realize and that individual incidents of bias add up to have a cumulative negative effect on Black people.
“Participants received either the intervention (a research-based article) or a control article. We followed up with these participants one to two weeks later and asked them to respond to race-related situations. Compared to participants in the control condition, those who received the intervention were more likely to validate and defend Black people’s concerns about racial bias. Across four studies, we found evidence that this intervention approach created increases in receptivity to bias concerns that endured over time and generalized to new situations.”
The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (JESP) aims to publish articles that extend or create conceptual advances in social psychology.