It's the little “stings”: Racial microaggressions against Asian American customers in retail and their effects

Abstract

Racial discrimination frequently occurs in the retail context. Yet, research has neglected to investigate the experiences and effects of racial microaggressions against Asian Americans in retail. To close this gap, the researchers opted for a mixed-method design combining one-on-one semi-structured interviews and online experiments. The findings in Study 1 show that Asian American customers face more racial microaggressions that are low in racial loading than are high. In Studies 2 and 3, the results indicate that participants in the high racial loading conditions feel higher degrees of anger and shame than those in the low racial loading conditions. Moreover, participants in the high racial loading conditions show lower repatronage intentions and higher word-of-mouth intentions than those in the low racial loading conditions. Also, anger has a stronger association with behavioral intentions than shame. This research adopts the attributional ambiguity theory to understand the psychological processes and effects of racial loading in microaggressions.