Drew Jacoby-Senghor, PhD
Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

Majority Group Members Misperceive the Effects of Diversity Policies that Benefit Them
Six studies show that majority group members misperceive diversity policies as unbeneficial to their ingroup, even when policies benefit them. Majority members perceived non-zero-sum university admission policies—policies that increase the acceptance of both URM (i.e., underrepresented minority) and non-URM applicants—as harmful to their ingroup when merely framed as “diversity” policies. Even for policies lacking diversity framing (i.e., “leadership” policies), majority members misperceived that their ingroup would not benefit when initiatives provided relatively greater benefit to URMs, but not when they provided relatively greater benefit to non-URMs. No evidence emerged that these effects were driven by ideological factors:  Majority members’ misperceptions occurred even when accounting for beliefs around diversity, groups, hierarchy, race, and politics. Instead, we find that majority group membership itself predicts misperceptions, such that both Black and White participants accurately perceive non-zero-sum policies as also benefiting the majority when participants are represented as a member of the minority group. 

Zoom link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99399423738

This lecture made possible in part by a generous endowment from Professor Allen L. Edwards. 
Faculty host: Cynthia Levine, cslevine@uw.edu.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by 1/22/20 to chairpsy@uw.edu.