This research project will advance understanding in the area of prejudice and stigma reduction by contributing to understanding the obstacles people face in prejudice confrontation. Prejudice remains a significant and frequent experience for members of stigmatized groups; one with important consequences for physical and psychological well-being. Previous research on prejudice reduction demonstrates that one effective way to decrease prejudice is to confront it when it occurs. Not only does prejudice confrontation reduce subsequent expressions of prejudice, but it also empowers victims of prejudice. Despite these positive consequences of prejudice confrontation, people often refrain from confronting the prejudice they witness. Understanding the factors that predict whether people will confront prejudice would benefit our understanding of an important social psychological phenomenon. The project also includes development of a training program to teach people how to overcome the obstacles to confrontation.
This research builds on previous knowledge about prejudice confrontation. The first set of studies investigates participants' judgments about the urgency of taking action against prejudice by measuring perceptions of harm and injustice as a function of the type of prejudice, target presence, and witness reactions. The second set of studies measures participants' perceptions of responsibility for confronting prejudice as a function of the number of witnesses, target presence, and role accountability. The third and final set of studies examines whether participants confront prejudice as a function of perceptions of confrontation self-efficacy and outcome expectancies. Importantly, this research can provide a base from which to build training programs to empower those who witness prejudice to voice their disapproval, and ultimately these findings may generalize and be useful in attenuating the occurrence of other incivilities (e.g., bullying, teasing).
Previous research has shown that confrontation -- communicating one's displeasure with or disapproval of a perpetrator's prejudicial or discriminatory behavior directly to the responsible actor -- is an effective way to curb further incidents of bias and to change perpetrator's attitudes. It has also shown that confrontation empowers targets of discrimination and that, when targets fail to confront, they often suffer psychologically. Despite these clear benefits of confrontation, previous research has also revealed that people are often reluctant to confront perpetrators. Given the benefits associated with confrontation as well as the detriments associated with failing to confront, it is crucial to understand factors that influence the likelihood that people confront prejudicial remarks and discriminatory behavior. The research funded by this award focused specifically on the role of confrontation self-efficacy (CSE) in predicting confrontation. CSE is an individual difference variable involving perceptions of one's ability to confront a perpetrator successfully. As with other forms of self-efficacy, CSE likely develops from past experience. For example, perhaps people who are higher in CSE feel more confident in their ability because they have confronted a perpetrator who subsequently apologized for the offense. We conducted two experiments to determine whether we could measure CSE reliably and whether CSE predicts confrontation. We hypothesized that the higher participants were in CSE, the more likely they would be to confront, unless perceived costs were sufficiently high to outweigh any benefits of confronting. In both experiments, participants witnessed a racist remark in what they believed was a real-time Internet chat with another participant. We manipulated perceived costs via varying perpetrator power over participants (Exp. 1) and via varying confrontation outcome expectancies (positive, negative, or neutral; Exp. 2), and we coded participants' feedback to their alleged chat partners for evidence of confrontation. Our results suggest that CSE does not have a straightforward role in confrontation. Although it predicted increased likelihood of confronting in Exp. 2 (for every unit increase in CSE, participants were 1.62 times more likely to confront), it actually predicted decreased likelihood of confronting in Exp. 1 (for every unit increase in CSE, participants were .65 times as likely to confront). Our study design differences may help us understand this puzzling discrepancy: in the study in which CSE exhibited a positive relationship with confrontation, there was no outcome dependency between participant and perpetrator, whereas in the study in which CSE exhibited a negative relationship with confrontation, their outcomes were highly interdependent. Of course, we did not specifically manipulate outcome dependency, and will need to in a future study to clarify its importance as a moderator of the relationship between CSE and confrontation. In hindsight, it is sensible that people who are higher in CSE, and thus are likely to be more experienced with and sensitive to the costs vs. benefits of confrontation, are reluctant to confront those with whom they are highly interdependent. The intellectual merit of this research is that it advances social psychology's understanding of factors that facilitate vs. inhibit the confrontation of prejudicial remarks and discriminatory behavior. More specifically, it reveals that confrontation self-efficacy is an important individual difference variable that can be measured reliably and that predicts behavior. Another intellectual contribution of this research is its focus on bystanders who witness the prejudicial treatment of others. Past research on confrontation has focused primarily on stigmatized targets who directly experience discrimination. Because prejudicial remarks are often made in contexts where target group members are not present, it is important to examine non-target bystanders' reactions. Indeed, previous research has shown that people who are not members of stigmatized groups can sometimes be more effective confronters than those who are traditionally targeted, and they are less likely to be labeled overly sensitive "whiners." The broader impacts of this research primarily concern education. Specifically, 5 graduate and 19 undergraduate students -- 7 of whom were underrepresented minorities -- were involved in this project, assisting with pilot testing, research software programming, data collection, and data coding and analyses. The undergraduate students also presented this work at a local undergraduate research conference, and one attended a national social psychology conference twice. They learned about the research process from start to finish, and several are now in doctoral programs in psychology. In addition, campus publicity of this award led indirectly to my requested leadership in campus diversity initiatives, including the formation of a school-wide Diversity Council, whose mission is to promote diversity awareness among faculty, staff, and students.
