Racial Similarity Research Articles

The role of fear of evaluation in group perception

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with interpersonal impairment. One possible reason for this dysfunction is that people with SAD evaluate others differently on dimensions of warmth and dominance compared to individuals without the disorder. In the current study, we examined whether two core constructs of SAD, fear of negative evaluation and fear of positive evaluation, affect the judgments that people make about groups based on warmth and dominance. We also investigated whether racial similarity (i.e., whether someone is the same race as those they’re interacting with) and ethnic identity (i.e., one’s sense of belonging to a particular social group) played a role in the types of evaluations people made. We created vignettes about groups varying in warmth and dominance, as well as photos varying in racial makeup. We presented photo-vignette pairs to participants and asked them to rate their desire to interact with the groups depicted in the photo-vignette. Participants in general reported greater desire to interact with warmer and less dominant groups. People with higher fear of negative evaluation reported higher desire for interaction with warmer groups, and those with higher fear of positive evaluation reported higher desire to interact with less dominant groups. We did not find any support for our hypothesis that people with stronger ethnic identity would show greater desire to interact with groups that were more similar to their race. Implications for treatment and directions for further research are discussed.

Does beauty encourage sharing? Exploring the role of physical attractiveness and racial similarity in collaborative fashion consumption

Collaborative consumption (CC)—where consumers share ownership of commodities—has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. Nevertheless, studies have yet to uncover unique factors that can be leveraged by companies to increase purchase intentions toward shareable goods. One of the major concerns among CC users is the issue of contamination. Applying the theories of consumer contamination, physical attractiveness, and similarity attraction, this study examines the influence of positive contamination factors involved in CC of fashion items through two experimental studies with 242 responses. Results show that consumers preferred to purchase items from an attractive or racially similar seller over an unattractive or racially dissimilar seller, and their contamination perceptions were lower for items associated with an attractive or racially similar seller. Such results did not differ across product types with varying degrees of contact. Findings extend current research in CC by revealing meaningful implications for practitioners on alleviating consumers’ concerns about contamination.

What advice do parents give their children about plea bargains? Understanding the role of parent race, attorney race, and attorney recommendations

This study examined parent acquiescence to attorney recommendations in plea bargain decisions, and the effect of racial similarity between an attorney and their juvenile client’s parent. Scholarship indicates that youth are vulnerable to the influence of authority figures in plea-bargaining, leading to a reliance on parental and attorney input for plea decisions. Parents read a vignette with attorney’s race manipulated, imagining they are participating in the plea-bargaining process and the attorney is giving them recommendations regarding how to plea. Results show White parents were more likely to take a plea and had more trust in the attorneys. Black attorneys were found to be most trustworthy, especially for White parents. Parent race impacted plea advice acquiescence more than attorney/parent racial similarity.

Exploring the Influence of Race in Mate Copying Using Former Partner Evaluations

Human mate choice is a complex, nuanced process that incorporates factors including physical attractiveness, race, culture, and social values. Choosing the wrong partner can be a risky and costly affair; hence, mate choosers may copy the choices of others to inform their own decisions about the mate quality of a potential partner. This phenomenon is known as mate copying (MC). Consistent with previous research methods, the current study presented a sample of 461 Australian women with photographic stimuli of target men of one of three races paired with a description of a former female partner evaluating the target man either positively or negatively. Racial similarity between participants and the target man was statistically controlled for. As hypothesised, positive evaluations elicited MC whereas negative evaluations elicited mate avoidance. Racial similarity was also shown to influence measures of desirability and MC propensity. Results were discussed within the context of existing human MC literature, with particular emphasis on exploring how new factors affect the expression of MC intent within the Australian female demographic. Recommendations for further research based on these outcomes were also made.

Résumé screening heuristic outcomes: an examination of hiring manager evaluation bias

PurposeHiring managers commonly rely on system-justifying motives and attitudes during résumé screening. Given the prevalent use of modern résumé formats (e.g. LinkedIn) that include not only an applicant's credentials but also headshot photographs, visible sources of information such as an applicant's race are also revealed while a hiring manager simultaneously evaluates a candidate's suitability. As a result, such screening is likely to activate evaluation bias. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of a hiring manager's perceptions of race-system justification, that is, support for the status quo in relations between Black and White job candidates in reinforcing or mitigating hiring bias related to in-group and out-group membership during résumé screening.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from system justification theory (SJT) in a pre-selection context, in an experimental study involving 174 human resource managers, the authors tested two boundary conditions of the expected relationship between hiring manager and job candidate race on candidate ratings: (1) a hiring manager's affirmative action (AA) attitudes and system-justifying attitudes and (2) a job candidate's manipulated suitability for a position. This approach enabled us to juxtapose the racial composition of hiring manager–job candidate dyads under conditions in which the job candidate's race and competency for a posted position were manipulated to examine the conditions under which White and Black hiring managers are likely to make biased evaluations. The authors largely replicated these findings in two follow-up studies with 261 students and 361 online raters.FindingsThe authors found that information on a candidate's objective suitability for a job resulted in opposite-race positive bias among Black evaluators and same-race positive bias among White evaluators in study 1 alone. Conversely, positive attitudes toward AA policies resulted in in-group favoritism and strengthened a positive same-race bias for Black evaluators (study 1 and 2). We replicated this finding with a third sample to directly test system-justifying attitudes (study 3). The way in which White raters rated White candidates reflected the same attitudes against systems (AA attitudes) that Black raters rating Black candidates exhibited in the authors’ first two studies. Positive system-justifying attitudes or positive attitudes toward AA did not, however, translate into the elevation of same-race candidate ratings of suitability above those of opposite-race candidates.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the size of the sample is on par with the percentage of Blacks nationwide in private-sector managerial-level positions ideally, the authors would have preferred to oversample Black HR managers. Given the scarcity of focus on Black HR managers, future researchers, using diverse samples of evaluators should also consider not only managers' and candidates' race but also their social dominance orientation. Moreover, it is important that future researchers use more racially diverse samples from other industries to more fully identify the ways in which the dynamics of system-justifying processes can emerge to influence evaluation bias during résumé screening.Practical implicationsAdvances in technology pose new challenges to HR hiring practices. This study attempts to fill a void regarding the unintended effects of bias during digital résumé screening. These trends have important HR implications. Initial screening of a job applicant's credentials while concurrently viewing the individual's photograph is likely to activate subconscious evaluation bias, produces inaccurate applicant ratings. This study's findings should caution hiring managers about the potential for bias to arise when viewing job candidates' digital résumés and encourage them to carefully examine various boundary conditions on racial similarity bias effects on applicant pre-screening and subsequent hiring decisions.Social implicationsThe study’s results suggest that bias might be attenuated as organizational leaders engage in efforts to understand their system-justifying motives and examine perceptions of the workplace social hierarchy (i.e. responses to status hierarchies) linked to perceptions of the status quo. For example, understanding how system justifying motives influence evaluation bias will inform how best to design training and other interventions that link discussions of workforce diversity to the relationships among groups within the organization's social hierarchy. This line of research should be further explored to better understand the complex forces at work when hiring managers adopt system-justifying motives during hiring evaluations.Originality/valueThe authors address the limitations of prior research by examining interactions between boundary conditions in a real-world context using real human resources hiring managers and more contemporary personnel-screening practices to test changes in the direction and strength of the relationship between hiring manager–job candidate race and hiring manager evaluations. Thus, the authors’ findings have implications for hiring bias and understanding of system-justification processes, particularly regarding how, when and why hiring managers support the status quo (i.e. perpetuate inequity) even if they are disadvantaged as a result.

OUR TOWN

OUR TOWN

Racial Similarity, LMX and Subordinate Outcomes: Does it Matter if You’re Black or White?

Racial Similarity, LMX and Subordinate Outcomes: Does it Matter if You’re Black or White?

‘Mixt marriages’: Ethnic and Religious Intermarriage among German-Speakers in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania

ABSTRACTCivil and religious authorities in eighteenth-century America grew increasingly concerned over the freedom with which young people chose their marriage partners. Correlating racial, religious and cultural similarity in marriage to a stable society, these authorities attempted to limit marriage and sexual choices by requiring parental authority for marriage, distributing permits to a select few to perform marriages, and criminalizing racial miscegenation. Eighteenth-century Pennsylvania German authorities supported this attitude because they associated ethnic and religious out-marriage with the weakening of the body and the destruction of society. My study uses the marriage and birth records of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans to examine their marriage and sexual relationships. I discovered that Pennsylvania Germans overwhelmingly chose to marry other German-speakers, out of proportion with their population. By examining the then available works on marriage and procreation, I discovered that Pennsylvania Germans read works that emphasized the necessity and importance of intra-ethnic and religious sex and marriage for the health of their children. Pennsylvania Germans chose their marriage partners in alignment with their community’s attitudes towards those of other ethnicities and religions. A small data set further suggests that relationships with non-Germans occurred but rarely became formalized. This complicates what we know about the sexual and emotional revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; far from a linear progression of attitudes towards sex, marriage, and others, eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans expressed multiple, contextually-driven perspectives, and in the process they created and maintained strong ethnic communities.

Are Spending Patterns of Local Government Interdependent?: Strategic Interactions of U.S. Local Governments in California

This study examines if a local government’s policies depend on that of similarly situated counties, called “neighborliness,” by analyzing the panel data of county governments in California from 2001 to 2014. In our study, the results show that the spending pattern of a local government is positively influenced by neighboring governments that are similar in terms of personal income and geographic proximity, whereas racial similarity does not work as a “neighboring” characteristic. Local governments benchmark the policies or programs of other neighboring governments, as they might face similar policy issues based on similar economic and environmental conditions. Interestingly, we also find that the degree of mimicking behavior depends on fiscal autonomy.

Ethno-racial similarity, relationship conflict and trust in supervisor-subordinate dyads

PurposeIn management research, little is known about how ethno-racial minority leaders interact with similar employees in supervisor–subordinate relationships. This study aims to examine and provide a deeper understanding of individuals’ negative reactions to similar others, thus highlighting the double-edged nature of demographic similarity which has historically predicted positive affective reactions.Design/methodology/approachUsing a survey design, the authors collected data from supervisor-subordinate dyads from multiple companies from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. They used ordinary least squares regression and conditional process analysis to test the hypotheses, including a two-stage moderation and moderated mediation.FindingsIncorporating social context, i.e. minority status, as a moderator, the results show that ethno-racial minority leaders supervising ethno-racially similar subordinates were more vulnerable to relationship conflict than non-minority dyads. This, in turn, is linked to a reduction in the leaders’ feelings of trust toward their ethno-racially similar subordinate.Originality/valueThis study draws on social identity theory and status characteristics theory to explain the contradictory processes and outcomes associated with dyadic ethno-racial similarity and suggests the conditions under which dyad racial similarity is connected with unfavorable outcomes. This framework helps to broaden the boundary conditions of relational demography to provide a more nuanced explanation of when and why minority leaders in demographically similar hierarchical dyads experience more relationship conflict, which ultimately diminishes trust.

Reducing Racial Similarity Bias in Interviews by Increasing Structure: A Quasi-Experiment Using Multilevel Analysis

We used a quasi-experiment to examine the relationship between interview structure and racial bias in simulated employment interviews. Although recent meta-analytic findings suggest that high-structure interviews (as compared with low-structure interviews) reduce same-race bias in interview ratings, this claim has not been tested using research designs that allow for stronger inference about the potential links between interview structure and bias. We showed videotaped interviews to 386 business students and, within both high- and low-structure conditions, determined levels of racial similarity bias using multilevel analysis. Our study used a fully crossed design within each condition, where all raters evaluated all applicants. As we expected, findings indicated that interviewers favored racially similar applicants less in high-structure interviews than in low-structure interviews. Our findings provide quasi-experimental evidence that increased interview structure may be effective to suppress racial similarity bias in employment interview ratings.

Expectativas dos professores e mismatch racial na escola pública brasileira

RESUMO O artigo examina em que medida as similaridades ou discrepâncias raciais entre professores e alunos nas turmas das escolas públicas brasileiras influenciam as expectativas docentes. Adicionalmente, são analisadas a ocorrência de diferenciais de gênero nas expectativas e a interseccionalidade com as diferenças raciais. Os dados utilizados são da Prova Brasil 2013 (BRASIL, 2015). A principal conclusão é que a similaridade racial entre professores e turmas de alunos negros está associada a maiores expectativas docentes, especialmente quanto à conclusão do ensino fundamental e entrada na universidade. Além disso, o fato de as turmas serem lecionadas por professoras também está vinculado a maiores expectativas. Contudo, as expectativas são explicadas em grande medida pelo aprendizado dos estudantes em matemática e pelo ambiente pedagógico em sala de aula.

“If I Can Offer You Some Advice”: Rapport and Data Collection in Interviews Between Adults of Different Ages

Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult‐adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher‐interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly‐aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.

Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums

Bone Rooms reconstructs the rise of physical anthropology in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. It aims to deepen understanding of the “cultural significance” of the skeletal collections created by scholars and museum curators (p. 14). Samuel James Redman maps a shift from an emphasis on racial classification of these remains to their use in efforts to understand evolution and early mankind. Two questions guide the discussion: What explains the “bone craze” of this period? and, How did this shift in emphasis occur? By the early twentieth century, U.S. museums had acquired an estimated 500,000 skeletal remains, largely Native American (Megan J. Highet, “Body Snatching and Grave Robbing,” History and Anthropology, Dec. 2005, pp. 415–40). Redman argues that the collections’ scope reflects anthropologists’ response to the myth of the “rapidly disappearing” Indian, rushing to fill their cabinets with bones acquired opportunistically from graves, building sites, world's fairs, medical schools, and battlegrounds (p. 72). He suggests the changing interpretation of these remains reflected institutional and biographical factors, including the decline in eugenics’ respectability with the rise of Nazism, the influence of the African American anthropologist William Montague Cobb's search for racial similarity rather than difference, and the rise of the Franz Boas school that emphasized cultural relativism rather than race.

The National Rise in Residential Segregation

Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twentieth century was not strictly driven by urbanization, black migration, or white flight: it resulted from increasing racial sorting at the household level. In all areas—North and South, urban and rural—segregation increased dramatically.

Exploring police-resident racial equality and violent crime

Purpose – Residential segregation based on race/ethnicity is associated with higher crime rates. However, when there is greater diversity within a neighbourhood, there may be less clustering of crime. One sign of such diversity beyond direct measures of racial similarity may be the proportion of minority officers employed by municipal police departments. As such, the purpose of this paper is to test the effect of the proportion of minority police officers on violent crime within minority communities, controlling for residential segregation. Design/methodology/approach – Multi-level modelling of 91 American cities from the 2000 National Neighbourhood Crime Study was used. Findings – It was found that as minority populations within census tracts increase, violent crime also increases; and crime is associated with an increase in segregation. However, racial composition of police departments can moderate the impact that community racial composition has on violent crime. Originality/value – The current findings point to crime control strategies relevant to municipalities which focus on creating neighbourhoods of racial heterogeneity and more diverse police agencies.

Disentangling the Study of Person Cue Processing from Face and Body Processing

Event Abstract Back to Event Disentangling the Study of Person Cue Processing from Face and Body Processing Justin Gaetano1*, Anna Brooks1 and Rick Zwan1 1 Southern Cross University, School of Health and Human Sciences, Australia According to Freeman and Ambady’s (2011) theory of person construal, categorical information about someone (e.g. their sex and race) both mediates and is mediated by lower-order factors (e.g. specific patterns of light) and higher-order factors (e.g. stereotypes and task demands). It is possible then there exists a neural array which processes categorical sex signals in a generalised manner, irrespective of the particular dimorphism transmitting those signals (e.g. gait pattern, body region, voice, etc.). However, a survey of the sex perception literature reveals that mechanisms are invariably discussed in terms of the particular stimuli used, with the most popular contenders being images of female and male faces. Due to strong evidence that faces are processed via specialised routes in the brain, predictions about sex-specialised arrays cannot be tested without comparing sex discrimination performance across a range of dimorphic stimuli. We argue here that as a partial-body representation, the hand is one such comparable stimulus, and is so for several empirical reasons. First of all, physical measures of the hand diverge by sex, and our research shows that observers are sensitive to those differences. Second, sensitivity changes as a function of racial similarity between the hand and its observer – that is, observers have an advantage for own-race hands as they do for own-race faces (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Third, sex after-effects have been documented utilising not just faces (Rhodes et al., 2004) but also hands (Kovács et al., 2006). Fourth and finally, sex response strategies tend to be male-biased when viewing hands; an effect observed previously using faces as stimuli (Wild et al., 2000). We conclude this presentation with suggestions on how such psychophysical data might be utilised for the furthering of neuropsychological studies on sex processing. Keywords: visual sex discrimination, dimorphism, other person perception, perceptual biases, human hands Conference: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014. Presentation Type: Poster Topic: Sensation and Perception Citation: Gaetano J, Brooks A and Zwan R (2015). Disentangling the Study of Person Cue Processing from Face and Body Processing. Conference Abstract: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00196 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 19 Feb 2015; Published Online: 24 Apr 2015. * Correspondence: Mr. Justin Gaetano, Southern Cross University, School of Health and Human Sciences, Coffs Harbour, Australia, justin.gaetano85@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Justin Gaetano Anna Brooks Rick Zwan Google Justin Gaetano Anna Brooks Rick Zwan Google Scholar Justin Gaetano Anna Brooks Rick Zwan PubMed Justin Gaetano Anna Brooks Rick Zwan Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

When the Methodological Shoe is on the Other Foot: African American Interviewer and White Interviewees

Some scholars engaging in the insider/outsider debate have argued that the pairing of researcher and subjects based on racial similarity—i.e., “race matching”—is the most effective means for conducting qualitative research. Although insider/outsider status has been discussed with respect to white researchers' studies of African Americans, I explore the heretofore rarely discussed situation in which an African American is the researcher and whites are the subjects. I argue that insider status with respect to race continues to be based on a presumed connectedness linked to phenotypical characteristics—like skin color or hair texture. Yet, rather than experiencing a solely insider or outsider status, researchers and subjects experience what I call “insider moments” wherein their interests converge and they are able to share in the kinds of interactions that yield important insights. I conclude by evaluating the utility of insider/outsider status in qualitative research.

Manual Small Incision Cataract Surgery in Phacomorphic Glaucoma: Surgical Technique and Outcome in North-eastern India.

ABSTRACTBackground: North-eastern region of India continue to suffer from limited resources, added upon by Mongoloid racial similarity and poor cataract surgery rate has contributed to the increase incidence of advanced cataract like phacomorphic glaucoma.Objective: To evaluate the visual prognosis and related complications of phacomorphic glaucoma cases by manual small incision cataract surgeries in North-eastern region of India.Materials and methods: This retrospective case series study includes 65 phacomorphic glaucoma cases diagnosed between June 2009 to December 2011 in Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences, Manipur. Preoperative routine evaluation includes slit-lamp biomicroscopy, measurement of IOP, gonioscopy of fellow eye, axial length measurement, AC depth and lens thickness by A-scan. Manual small incision cataract surgery with intraocular lens implantation was performed in all the 65 eyes. Complete ophthalmic examination was done at each follow-up visit.Results: The mean preoperative IOP was 35.14 (±6.35) mm Hg and IOP at the 3rd month follow-up was 18.65 (±1.3) mm Hg with a statistically significant lowering of IOP (p < 0.0001) at the last follow-up. Intraoperative complications were minimal. Corneal edema, fibrinous exudates in AC was seen in few cases. Postoperative best corrected visual acuity was 6/6-6/12 in 46 eyes, 6/18-6/36 in 12 eyes, 6/60-3/60 in 4 eyes and less than 3/60 in three eyes. Antiglaucoma medication was discontinued immediately after each surgery.Conclusion: Manual small incision cataract surgery being inexpensive play a key role in management of poor outreach program marker like phacomorphic glaucoma in effectively controlling the IOP and achieving good visual acuity with minimal complications.How to cite this article: Rajkumari V, Kaminibabu KS, Bhabanisana RD, Victor R. Manual Small Incision Cataract Surgery in Phacomorphic Glaucoma: Surgical Technique and Outcome in North-eastern India. J Current Glau Prac 2013; 7(2):43-48.

The Color of Threat: Race, Threat Perception, and the Demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–1923)

Race is understudied in International Relations generally and International Security specifically. To mitigate this omission, this article provides a racial theory of threat perception. It argues that, under certain conditions, racial prejudices embedded in racial identities shape threat perceptions and generate behavioral dispositions. In the first step, racial similarity deflates threat perceptions, while racial difference inflates them. In the second step, deflated threat perceptions facilitate cooperation among racially similar agents, while inflated threat perceptions facilitate discord among racially different agents. Using extensive archival and secondary sources, the article illustrates the explanatory value of the theory in the case of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-23).