As the US population grows more ethnically diverse, so does its workforce. Presently, individuals of non-European American backgrounds comprised approximately 36% of the American workforce, and by 2050, these workers will be responsible for 85% of its growth. There is a striking lack of ethnic diversity, however, among leaders in all sectors of the American economy. For example, although Asian Americans are the most highly represented minority group in academic settings (comprising 6.2% of faculty), and have the highest percentage of college degrees of any ethnic group, they hold only 2.4% of top administrative positions in higher education, compared to African Americans (9.4%) and Latino Americans (3.6%). This disparity, and similar ones observed in business and political settings, have been cited as evidence of a "bamboo ceiling," or limit to career advancement for Asian Americans. What factors might be responsible for the bamboo ceiling and other barriers to advancement for different ethnic minority groups?
Various scholars have argued that these barriers are due to racial discrimination and stereotyping. In the current project, Jeanne Tsai (Stanford University) and colleagues propose that European American employers may unknowingly engage in "affective discrimination," or discrimination based on a cultural mismatch between the emotional ideals ("ideal affect") of European American employers and their ethnic minority employees. Affective discrimination may be less obvious than other types of discrimination because people are often unaware of how their cultures shape their emotions, and because the emotion-based judgments that people make about others often occur quickly, automatically, and outside conscious awareness. In previous work, Tsai and colleagues found that whereas North American cultures value excitement, enthusiasm, and other "high arousal positive" states more, East Asian cultures value calm, peacefulness, and other "low arousal positive" states more. Thus, consistent with their ideals, European American employers may seek to promote excited and enthusiastic leaders, which may inadvertently disadvantage Asian Americans and other employees who value and therefore express other affective states.
The project will examine whether people's ideal affect influences their leadership judgments in different occupational settings (business and engineering) and under varying work conditions (periods of normality vs. periods of crisis), why biases occur (i.e., the underlying psychological mechanisms), and whether people can be taught to account for cultural and individual differences in ideal affect when judging others' potential for leadership. The project uniquely utilizes cross-cultural, experimental, and neuroimaging methods to capture these processes. Findings from this work will advance scientific understanding of how culture shapes the judgments people make about others based on emotional expression, and will advance methods for integrating neural, psychological, and cultural levels of analysis. This work also promises to identify ways of breaking down barriers to advancement for different ethnic groups in the U.S., and to develop methods of teaching members of all groups how to work together harmoniously in an increasingly multicultural society.
