Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Efrén Pérez about Political Psychology and the Study of Race and Ethnic Politics

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Previous articleNext article FreeAsk a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Efrén Pérez about Political Psychology and the Study of Race and Ethnic PoliticsRobyn Marasco and Charles TienRobyn Marasco Search for more articles by this author and Charles Tien Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRM & CT:Much of your work deals with what is unspoken in politics but shapes political attitudes and behaviors. Why is it important to pay attention to what is implicit? How can political scientists access the unspoken?EP:In terms of why it’s important to study implicit phenomena, this is a concept that has been revolutionizing the way many social psychologists understand human thinking and the human mind. The main lesson is that while we tend to value and emphasize the deliberative self-professed thoughts that individuals have, a lot of what we consider thinking is underwritten by a variety of implicit processes. So, what makes something implicit? In a psychological sense, “implicit” is an adjective referring to a set of psychological processes that are automatic, hard to control, and that can be beyond a person’s immediate awareness. That is in contradistinction to what I think many political scientists consider a type of thinking that is more deliberative, that involves a lot more effort and control, and that assumes that an individual has very direct and clear access to the mental contents that they carry around in their mind. So, if you think about how political scientists typically study a phenomenon like public opinion, I would say that 99% of the time, if we want to know something about people’s opinions or attitudes regarding politics, we ask them about it, and we get perfectly valid responses that end up yielding a variety of insights. The challenge is that what we are doing is also missing a substantial portion of what actually influences peoples’ political views. In fact, in recent work—some of my own included—we argue a lot of these implicit processes not only precede our more deliberative self-professed thoughts, they also structure and undergird those very thoughts. So, it’s not something that we can dismiss just because we may find it normatively displeasing. This is how people generally think as humans, it is part of our cognitive architecture; so, for political scientists, this is an ideal opportunity to break new conceptual, theoretical, and empirical ground going forward.There are a variety of measurement strategies, all native to the field of psychology—social psychology in particular—but perhaps the most prominent of these measures is what’s known as an “implicit association test.” This measure does not ask people what they think or believe about certain political objects. Rather, it assesses—on the order of milliseconds—how quickly one is able to classify stimuli that are related to the very optics we are curious about as researchers. These are very indirect measures that don’t presume people have introspective access to those mental contents, but again, this is all about tapping into an area in people’s minds that has been hiding in the dark, so to speak. Now, there are controversies around these measures, but the good thing from a scientific perspective is that irrespective of the particular measurement strategy that scholars employ, the evidence across the last twenty-five or thirty years, whether it’s the implicit association test or not, is that there seems to be something there as far as implicit attitudes, implicit beliefs, and implicit stereotypes. So, we can always continue refining our measurement approaches, but the big game in studying implicit political thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs, is that there is this other side of the human mind that bears heavily on people’s views about public affairs more generally.RM & CT:Can you talk about some of the methods you use in the study of politics?EP:This is a pretty straightforward question for me, it really boils down to three. These methods consist of surveys, which have been around for a long time in our discipline; experiments, where we randomly assign individuals to various levels of a variable of interest; and the third approach I use is these indirect measures to captures people’s implicit thoughts. The reason for using this trifecta of methodological approaches is that each of these on their own is imperfect—it reveals useful information but not complete information. By triangulating across these three types of approaches, the goal of my research is not necessarily to iron out all of the limitations of any one particular approach, but rather, if I have a certain hypothesis that I want to test and I can find convincing evidence that is fairly robust across methodological approaches, then that to me is a bit more convincing that the trend I am finding is, in fact, real, and not some methodological artifact.RM & CT:How is the discipline of political science being transformed by new research on race and ethnic politics?EP:The main way it’s being transformed is that new research is complicating and adding nuance to what we think about race and ethnicity in American politics and beyond. One of these areas has to do with the multiple types of identities that individuals have in addition to their racial and ethnic identities. This is a slight redirection in orientation, but a very fruitful one because just like most humans on earth, people who are minorities—members of nontraditional populations—are also complex in the sense that they have multiple identities and identity categories that they have access to. So, while we privilege the role of race and ethnicity, we have placed less emphasis on these many other identities and how they relate to or interact with a person’s race or ethnicity. This is about being able not only to predict what is going to happen, but also to explain why it’s going to happen, so if there is a psychology of race and ethnicity, this is the time and era I think where it is hard to argue against such an endeavor.RM & CT:Can political psychology account for systems and structures? Or is it all about biases and behaviors? How does the political psychology of racism account for the idea of systemic racism?EP:There is a temptation to think that we can boil down something as complex as racism to the human mind, that racism, to the extent that it exists, is a problem of the mind and we’ll sort of soft-pedal and omit the fact that there are structural underpinnings to this very thorny challenge. I think the more sophisticated analyses will teach us that a person’s psychology as it relates to their sense of racism or their sense of prejudice is entangled or embedded in the very structures where that individual resides and spends most of their time. One way that political psychology is useful is that political psychologists and social psychologists have a lot to say about hostility, about biases, about prejudice toward outgroups. That is important work in its own right. But what I think gets a little bit neglected, and one of the areas where I see a lot of our colleagues moving toward, is that it is disconnected from power structures. All individuals, minorities themselves, can harbor prejudice, negative feelings toward an outgroup, but having negative feelings or negative attitudes toward an outgroup does not entail having power over them. So, that is the big distinction between members of majority groups, like non-Hispanic whites in the US, and minority groups, like Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans in the US. All of those individuals have prejudices to a certain degree, it’s an individual-level difference, but only among some of those individuals does their level of prejudice correspond with a strong degree of power. The way that I think about power is the way social psychologists would have us think about power, that is, how much influence another person or group has over our own individual outcomes. So, when you view it that way, if you take a case like Black-Latino relations in the United States, some African American individuals express hostility towards some Latinos and vice versa, but what’s missing in that equation is that while these biases are rampant, those groups are essentially fortifying the very stratification that keeps them at the bottom of the well. So, that is the difference in my mind between interpersonal biases, individual-level prejudices that we have, and the very power structures that they help to feed and reinforce.RM & CT:The Authoritarian Personality is the focus of this special issue of Polity. Was that book a part of your training and intellectual formation? What work do you see as foundational to the study of political psychology?EP:The Authoritarian Personality was a centerpiece manuscript in a couple of the weeks that I took as a grad student in a political psychology seminar, and these were some of the weeks that were focused on trying to study the wellsprings of intolerance toward outgroups. The idea behind The Authoritarian Personality, which has spawned an enormous literature, is that intolerance is sparked by individual differences in personality. So, the extent to which you are an intolerant person, whether that is in terms of race, gender, or moral domains, is fed by individual differences in personality—you are born and socialized to be an intolerant individual. You can actually organize individuals from high to low in terms of these dispositions like authoritarianism, and the higher levels of that trait that you have, such as authoritarianism, the more intolerant you are going to be. It was a foundational part of my upbringing, giving me a peek at one particular way to study intolerance, but what I was more influenced by were the weeks that followed our coverage of The Authoritarian Personality and some of the literature that came on the heels of that work. In particular, I was impressed by work that is known as social identity theory, and what is key here is that the view of prejudice for social identity theorists is that people aren’t walking around with prejudices baked into them. Rather our prejudices and our biases are actually functions of the groups that we affiliate and identify with. So prejudice actually is, by this view, a response to outgroups on the basis of an identity that I feel is important. In fact, what social identity theory would say is that prejudice is an attitude that flows from a particular identity, because that identity prescribes the expression of biases and antipathy toward outgroups as one of the norms that real members of a group should follow. To me, this is fascinating for a variety of reasons—because it redirects the conversation from why does prejudice manifest itself to when and among whom are we most likely to see prejudice, and, just as important, the very mechanisms or principles that help to explain through social identity theory when and why prejudice manifests itself, can also teach us some of the conditions under which that kind of prejudice gets minimized or snuffed out completely.RM & CT:Can you tell us a bit about the Race, Ethnicity, Politics, & Society (REPS) lab?EP:The REPS lab is sort of a brainchild of mine. When I joined UCLA about three years ago, what I saw on the horizon was an incredibly diverse campus. I mean, you come to UCLA and the campus itself is reflective of, not only racially and ethnically, the state of California, but also Los Angeles county more generally. In that sense it’s a harbinger of what we’re starting to see in many other areas outside of this Golden State. What I saw was an opportunity to seize on the diversity of the campus to train a new generation of scholars to study some of the thornier questions about intergroup relations or inter-minority relations, especially as they relate to politics. The REPS lab has three objectives. The first is that it’s a research incubator, so as a team of about fifteen individuals we are meeting each week to discuss someone’s work in progress, that’s a work in progress at any stage of development. The idea here is to ensure that individuals are not getting stuck in their workflow by providing them with actionable feedback and input. The second objective is we undertake an omnibus quarterly study. Here’s what happens: we make a call for proposals to the political science department at UCLA and with some of our partner departments at other UC campuses and other universities throughout the country, and we select about four to five proposals. Each of these proposals is essentially a five-minute module that contains some type of experimental intervention typically related to a question about race, ethnicity, and politics in the US. We put together these different modules and organize them thematically and based on scientific criteria, and we basically field the proposal using undergraduate students across these campuses as participants. The benefit is that these are rich racially and ethnically diverse samples. Now an individual might say, why run an experiment with undergraduates, how much can you learn? You can actually learn a lot about things by studying undergraduates, because the methodology that is being employed here is an experiment, and with experiments, the inference is about the treatments themselves, not the units. So, a way to view it is, it’s not that we are making inferences about particular Latinos, particular Asian Americans, or particular white respondents. What we are seeing is whether, in a sample of a population of interest, a given treatment has the anticipated effect. So this provides one initial, but useful, layer of experimental evidence. The logic is that on the basis of these findings or non-findings, a principal investigator through one of these studies, who is typically a graduate student in psychology or political science, can then build on that work and compete on more sure footing for additional resources and funding that goes well outside the lab. It’s essentially a data collection clinic. The last thing that the REPS lab seeks to do is provide grants, small grants on the order of $500–$1500. We make a call for proposals right before each summer to our affiliates and we select about eight individuals and those individuals are invited to be part of a summer lab program where we workshop, thoroughly, each of those ideas. After eight weeks the goal is to get each of those projects to a point, not that they’re going to yield perfect results but that they are going to yield results that are interpretable. Once we get to that point, we disburse the funds, these individual principle investigators collect their data and everyone goes on their merry way to use the data for field papers, publications, their dissertation work, etc.RM & CT:Can you give us a sneak preview of your current projects and forthcoming works?EP:Most of my time since I’ve arrived at UCLA about three years ago has been spent studying whether minoritized individuals in the US identify as a person of color. This is what I call PoC ID or people of color identity, and this is a new category that is essentially a mega-group comprised of a variety of racial and ethnic minorities. The main takeaway from this work is that this identity is real, we can measure it, and it is distinct from a person’s own racial or ethnic identity. The way this operates is that PoC ID essentially encapsulates all these other smaller racial and ethnic identities so that a person’s sense of being Black is nested under their sense of being a person of color; a person’s sense of being Latino or Asian American is nested under their sense of being a person of color. This nesting allows that person of color identity to be active in politics, and how is it activated? It’s activated by political elites, by political messages, by campaigns; it’s activated in the same way that any other type of identity is supposed to be catalyzed. I have a book-length project on this person of color identity called Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity that was published in August 2021 from the University of Chicago Press. In addition to that, I have a few papers, some in collaboration with very talented undergraduates at UCLA, pushing on and extending some of this work on people of color identity.RM & CT:Violence against people of color in the United States is on the rise. What concerns you and what gives you hope in our current moment?EP:What concerns me, but doesn’t surprise me, is how much we’re observing some members of the dominant group, non-Hispanic whites in the US, going beyond expressing negative attitudes to undertaking violent action, hurtful action, discrimination against a variety of marginalized and stigmatized outgroups. It’s not new, we’ve seen this before, but we’re not in the era where a political scientist who does not do political psychology can say this is all in people’s heads—it’s not, these negative attitudes are actually being manifested in actions and behaviors. These actions are very revealing in a variety of ways, but one of the ways that it is revealing to me is that when you have some members of a dominant group that think it’s okay to lash out behaviorally at another. There’s a temptation to think that those are the efforts of some individuals to bolster their dominant status within America’s racial hierarchy, but my read on this is that you’re seeing this lashing out because that racial hierarchy has already been unsettled, non-Hispanic whites are generally losing their perch as a dominant group in US. So, there’s a lot of soul-searching among white Americans, whether it’s happening passively or actively, about what to do when you are not the lone group perched atop a racial order; one of those manifestations is more aggressive violence against those below.What gives me some room for hope? As an academic, the very tools that social and political psychologists use to study why groups do not get along are the very tools that can teach us the conditions under which they do get along. One of the byproducts of this unsettled racial hierarchy, this arrangement of relationships between whites and nonwhites, is that it has accomplished, in some sense, the impossible. This person of color identity that I’ve been working on is the culmination in real-time of a mega identity that applies to a variety of disparate groups who arrived in the US under different circumstances, have been treated by US authorities distinctly, and have different politics and different aspirations. Yet, because of how intergroup relations work in a hierarchy, and because we are seeing the crumbling of that order in the US, these groups have a much stronger incentive to go beyond being allies and members of a coalition to actually identifying in a unified way as members of a larger collective—as people of color. Those are the kinds of things that I’m hopeful about, that not everything has to be conflictual, some of what we may see coming down the pike in a few years are things like how do you see greater collaboration, greater coalition-building between groups we typically didn’t think belonged together.RM & CT:What do you think is important for undergraduates to take away from a race and ethnic politics class?EP:There used to be a time in political science where a lot of work on race, ethnicity, and politics was sidelined, marginalized in the sense that it wasn’t thought to be mainstream because that’s research about those individuals, not research about the majority of individuals in the US. That’s no longer a tenable argument even if you wanted to make it. People of color in the aggregate are going to be at least 50% of the population nationally, they’re already at that threshold in many areas in the US. So, to study race, ethnicity, and politics is to do great social science. Rather than assuming how these members of nontraditional populations think, it’s about being curious intellectually about what motivates them, what drives them, what compels them to see things the way they do, under what conditions you can change those attitudes. For any undergraduate who is remotely interested, not only is the terrain wide open in terms of opportunity, it’s also commonsensical if you want to understand what is going to unfold in the US as far as race relations in the next 20 to 50 years. We better get going on understanding how a large, nontrivial segment of the population understands politics in this very heterogeneous country of ours.This interview took place as an email exchange in April 2021 and was edited for clarity.NotesEfrén Pérez is Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REPS) Lab. He is the author of several books, including Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (Chicago UP, 2021) and Racial Order, Racialized Responses: Interminority Politics in a Diverse Nation (Cambridge UP, 2021) (with Enya Kuo). He can be reached at [email protected].Robyn Marasco is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), which reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the passions, as well as several articles on critical theory and politics. She is currently a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She can be reached at [email protected].Charles Tien is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was a Fulbright Scholar in American Politics at Renmin University in Beijing, China. His recent publications have appeared in Italian Journal of Electoral Studies, The Forum, and Electoral Studies. He can be reached at [email protected]. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 54, Number 1January 2022The Authoritarian Personality The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717238 Views: 63 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryPublished online November 18, 2021 © 2021 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved. Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Robyn Marasco, Christina Gerhardt, and Kirk Wetters The Authoritarian Personality, Polity 54, no.11 (Nov 2021): 1–7.https://doi.org/10.1086/717253