The dynamic nature of student discipline and discipline disparities.

Researchers have long used end-of-year discipline rates to identify punitive schools, explore sources of inequitable treatment, and evaluate interventions designed to stem both discipline and racial disparities in discipline. Yet, this approach leaves us with a "static view"-with no sense of how disciplinary responses fluctuate throughout the year. What if daily discipline rates, and daily discipline disparities, shift over the school year in ways that could inform when and where to intervene? This research takes a "dynamic view" of discipline. It leverages 4 years of atypically detailed data regarding the daily disciplinary experiences of 46,964 students from 61 middle schools in one of the nation's largest school districts. Reviewing these data, we find that discipline rates are indeed dynamic. For all student groups, the daily discipline rate grows from the beginning of the school year to the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving break, falls before major breaks, and grows following major breaks. During periods of escalation, the daily discipline rate for Black students grows significantly faster than the rate for White students-widening racial disparities. Given this, districts hoping to stem discipline and disparities may benefit from timing interventions to precede these disciplinary spikes. In addition, early-year Black-White disparities can be used to identify the schools in which Black-White disparities are most likely to emerge by the end of the school year. Thus, the results reported here provide insights regarding not only when to intervene, but where to intervene to reduce discipline rates and disparities.

Escalated police stops of Black men are linguistically and psychologically distinct in their earliest moments.

Across the United States, police chiefs, city officials, and community leaders alike have highlighted the need to de-escalate police encounters with the public. This concern about escalation extends from encounters involving use of force to routine car stops, where Black drivers are disproportionately pulled over. Yet, despite the calls for action, we know little about the trajectory of police stops or how escalation unfolds. In study 1, we use methods from computational linguistics to analyze police body-worn camera footage from 577 stops of Black drivers. We find that stops with escalated outcomes (those ending in arrest, handcuffing, or a search) diverge from stops without these outcomes in their earliest moments-even in the first 45 words spoken by the officer. In stops that result in escalation, officers are more likely to issue commands as their opening words to the driver and less likely to tell drivers the reason why they are being stopped. In study 2, we expose Black males to audio clips of the same stops and find differences in how escalated stops are perceived: Participants report more negative emotion, appraise officers more negatively, worry about force being used, and predict worse outcomes after hearing only the officer's initial words in escalated versus non-escalated stops. Our findings show that car stops that end in escalated outcomes sometimes begin in an escalated fashion, with adverse effects for Black male drivers and, in turn, police-community relations.

White patients' physical responses to healthcare treatments are influenced by provider race and gender.

The healthcare workforce in the United States is becoming increasingly diverse, gradually shifting society away from the historical overrepresentation of White men among physicians. However, given the long-standing underrepresentation of people of color and women in the medical field, patients may still associate the concept of doctors with White men and may be physiologically less responsive to treatment administered by providers from other backgrounds. To investigate this, we varied the race and gender of the provider from which White patients received identical treatment for allergic reactions and measured patients' improvement in response to this treatment, thus isolating how a provider's demographic characteristics shape physical responses to healthcare. A total of 187 White patients experiencing a laboratory-induced allergic reaction interacted with a healthcare provider who applied a treatment cream and told them it would relieve their allergic reaction. Unbeknownst to the patients, the cream was inert (an unscented lotion) and interactions were completely standardized except for the provider's race and gender. Patients were randomly assigned to interact with a provider who was a man or a woman and Asian, Black, or White. A fully blinded research assistant measured the change in the size of patients' allergic reaction after cream administration. Results indicated that White patients showed a weaker response to the standardized treatment over time when it was administered by women or Black providers. We explore several potential explanations for these varied physiological treatment responses and discuss the implications of problematic race and gender dynamics that can endure "under the skin," even for those who aim to be bias free.

Conversations about race in Black and White US families: Before and after George Floyd's death.

Research has shown that Black parents are more likely than White parents to have conversations about race with their children, but few studies have directly compared the frequency and content of these conversations and how they change in response to national events. Here we examine such conversations in the United States before and after the killing of George Floyd. Black parents had conversations more often than White parents, and they had more frequent conversations post-Floyd. White parents remained mostly unchanged and, if anything, were less likely to talk about being White and more likely to send colorblind messages. Black parents were also more worried than White parents-both that their children would experience racial bias and that their children would perpetrate racial bias, a finding that held both pre- and post-Floyd. Thus, even in the midst of a national moment on race, White parents remained relatively silent and unconcerned about the topic.

Uncertain threat is associated with greater impulsive actions and neural dissimilarity to Black versus White faces.

Race is a social construct that contributes to group membership and heightens emotional arousal in intergroup contexts. Little is known about how emotional arousal, specifically uncertain threat, influences behavior and brain processes in response to race information. We investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated uncertain threat on impulsive actions to Black versus White faces in a community sample (n = 106) of Black and White adults. While undergoing fMRI, participants performed an emotional go/no-go task under three conditions of uncertainty: 1) anticipation of an uncertain threat (i.e., unpredictable loud aversive sound); 2) anticipation of an uncertain reward (i.e., unpredictable receipt of money); and 3) no anticipation of an uncertain event. Representational similarity analysis was used to examine the neural representations of race information across functional brain networks between conditions of uncertainty. Participants-regardless of their own race-showed greater impulsivity and neural dissimilarity in response to Black versus White faces across all functional brain networks in conditions of uncertain threat relative to other conditions. This pattern of greater neural dissimilarity under threat was enhanced in individuals with high implicit racial bias. Our results illustrate the distinct and important influence of uncertain threat on global differentiation in how race information is represented in the brain, which may contribute to racially biased behavior.

Believing that prejudice can change increases children's interest in interracial interactions.

Children begin interacting less across racial lines around middle childhood, but it remains unclear why. We examine the novel possibility that, at that time, children's prejudice theories-their understanding of prejudice as a fixed or malleable attribute-begin to influence their desire for interracial affiliation. We devise immersive behavioral experiences to evaluate when and how prejudice theories affect interracial affiliation. Study 1 measured prejudice theories among 8-13-year-olds (N = 152; 76 White, 76 racial minority) and observed children in a newly-developed social interaction task. In line with our hypothesis, children older than 10 years with stronger malleable-prejudice theories exhibited more interest and affiliation in a simulated cross- (vs. same-race) interaction, regardless of their preexisting prejudice level. Study 2 randomly assigned children to listen to a fixed- or malleable-prejudice theory story before engaging in a real, first-time interaction with a same- or cross-race partner at a different school via live video-stream (N = 150; 96 White, 54 racial minority). The malleable theory increased children's interest in further interaction with their cross-race partner. These findings highlight the promise of malleable-prejudice theories for sustaining positive interracial relationships during a critical developmental window-when the frequency of cross-race friendships typically declines.

Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception.

A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one's own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants' habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.

Race influences professional investors' financial judgments.

Of the $69.1 trillion global financial assets under management across mutual funds, hedge funds, real estate, and private equity, fewer than 1.3% are managed by women and people of color. Why is this powerful, elite industry so racially homogenous? We conducted an online experiment with actual asset allocators to determine whether there are biases in their evaluations of funds led by people of color, and, if so, how these biases manifest. We asked asset allocators to rate venture capital funds based on their evaluation of a 1-page summary of the fund's performance history, in which we manipulated the race of the managing partner (White or Black) and the strength of the fund's credentials (stronger or weaker). Asset allocators favored the White-led, racially homogenous team when credentials were stronger, but the Black-led, racially diverse team when credentials were weaker. Moreover, asset allocators' judgments of the team's competence were more strongly correlated with predictions about future performance (e.g., money raised) for racially homogenous teams than for racially diverse teams. Despite the apparent preference for racially diverse teams at weaker performance levels, asset allocators did not express a high likelihood of investing in these teams. These results suggest first that underrepresentation of people of color in the realm of investing is not only a pipeline problem, and second, that funds led by people of color might paradoxically face the most barriers to advancement after they have established themselves as strong performers.

Processing of Task-Irrelevant Race Information is Associated with Diminished Cognitive Control in Black and White Individuals.

The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants. We examined the neural correlates of behavioral effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and explored the influence of implicit racial attitudes on brain-behavior associations. Both Black and White participants showed more cognitive control failures, as indexed by dprime, to Black versus White faces, despite the irrelevance of race to the task demands. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by greater activity to Black faces in the fusiform face area, implicated in processing face and in-group information, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, associated with resolving stimulus-response conflict. Exploratory brain-behavior associations suggest different patterns in Black and White individuals. Black participants exhibited a negative association between fusiform activity and response time during impulsive errors to Black faces, whereas White participants showed a positive association between lateral OFC activity and cognitive control performance to Black faces when accounting for implicit racial associations. Together our findings propose that attention to race information is associated with diminished cognitive control that may be driven by different mechanisms for Black and White individuals.

Lifting the Bar: A Relationship-Orienting Intervention Reduces Recidivism Among Children Reentering School From Juvenile Detention.

When children return to school from juvenile detention, they face a severe stigma. We developed a procedure to orient educators and students toward each other as positive relationship partners during this period. In Study 1, through a structured exercise, students reentering school powerfully articulated to an educator of their choosing their prosocial hopes for school as well as challenges they faced. In a preliminary field trial (N = 47), presenting this self-introduction to this educator in a one-page letter via a third-party requesting the educator's help reduced recidivism to juvenile detention through the next semester from 69% to 29%. In Study 2 (preregistered), the letter led experienced teachers (N = 349) to express greater commitment to, anticipate more success for, and feel more love and respect for a student beginning their reentry into school, potentially initiating a better trajectory. The results suggest how relationship-orienting procedures may sideline bias and make school more supportive for students facing stigma.

The development of race effects in face processing from childhood through adulthood: Neural and behavioral evidence.

Most adults are better at recognizing recently encountered faces of their own race, relative to faces of other races. In adults, this race effect in face recognition is associated with differential neural representations of own- and other-race faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), a high-level visual region involved in face recognition. Previous research has linked these differential face representations in adults to viewers' implicit racial associations. However, despite the fact that the FFA undergoes a gradual development which continues well into adulthood, little is known about the developmental time-course of the race effect in FFA responses. Also unclear is how this race effect might relate to the development of face recognition or implicit associations with own- or other-races during childhood and adolescence. To examine the developmental trajectory of these race effects, in a cross-sectional study of European American (EA) children (ages 7-11), adolescents (ages 12-16) and adults (ages 18-35), we evaluated responses to adult African American (AA) and EA face stimuli, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and separate behavioral measures outside the scanner. We found that FFA responses to AA and EA faces differentiated during development from childhood into adulthood; meanwhile, the magnitudes of race effects increased in behavioral measures of face-recognition and implicit racial associations. These three race effects were positively correlated, even after controlling for age. These findings suggest that social and perceptual experiences shape a protracted development of the race effect in face processing that continues well into adulthood.

Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect.

Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police-community trust.

Americans' Health Mindsets: Content, Cultural Patterning, and Associations With Physical and Mental Health.

BACKGROUND: Health mindsets are mental frameworks that help people recognize, organize, interpret, and respond to health-relevant information. Although mindsets shape health behaviors and outcomes, no study has examined the health mindsets of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse Americans. PURPOSE: We explored the content, cultural patterning, and health correlates of diverse Americans' health mindsets. METHODS: Two studies surveyed approximately equal numbers of African American, Asian American, European American, and Latinx American men and women of lower and higher socioeconomic status (SES). Study 1 (N = 334) used open-ended questions to elicit participants' mindsets about the definitions, causes, and benefits of health. Study 2 (N = 320) used Study 1's results to develop a closed-ended instrument. RESULTS: In Study 1, open-ended questioning revealed six overarching mindset themes: behavioral, medical, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual. The most prevalent mindsets were psychological definitions, behavioral causes, and psychological benefits. Participants mentioned more cause themes than definition or benefit themes, and mindset theme mentions correlated with worse health. Older participants mentioned more themes than younger, women mentioned more definition themes than men, and low-SES participants mentioned more cause themes than high-SES participants. In Study 2, closed-ended scales uncovered more complex and positive health mindsets. Psychological and spiritual benefit mindsets correlated with good mental health. African Americans and women endorsed the widest array of mindsets, and the spiritual benefit mindset partially explained the superior mental health of African Americans. CONCLUSIONS: Many Americans hold simplistic, illness-focused health mindsets. Cultivating more complex, benefit-focused, and culturally appropriate health mindsets could support health.

Two strikes: race and the disciplining of young students.

There are large racial disparities in school discipline in the United States, which, for Black students, not only contribute to school failure but also can lay a path toward incarceration. Although the disparities have been well documented, the psychological mechanisms underlying them are unclear. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that such disparities are, in part, driven by racial stereotypes that can lead teachers to escalate their negative responses to Black students over the course of multiple interpersonal (e.g., teacher-to-student) encounters. More generally, we argue that race not only can influence how perceivers interpret a specific behavior, but also can enhance perceivers' detection of behavioral patterns across time. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical benefits of employing this novel approach to stereotyping across a range of real-world settings.

Racial disparities in incarceration increase acceptance of punitive policies.

During the past few decades, punitive crime policies have led to explosive growth in the United States prison population. Such policies have contributed to unprecedented incarceration rates for Blacks in particular. In this article, we consider an unexamined relationship between racial disparities and policy reform. Rather than treating racial disparities as an outcome to be measured, we exposed people to real and extreme racial disparities and observed how this drove their support for harsh criminal-justice policies. In two experiments, we manipulated the racial composition of prisons: When the penal institution was represented as "more Black," people were more concerned about crime and expressed greater acceptance of punitive policies than when the penal institution was represented as "less Black." Exposure to extreme racial disparities, then, can lead people to support the very policies that produce those disparities, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle.

We built this culture (so we can change it): Seven principles for intentional culture change.

Calls for culture change abound. Headlines regularly feature calls to change the "broken" or "toxic" cultures of institutions and organizations, and people debate which norms and practices across society are now defunct. As people blame current societal problems on culture, the proposed fix is "culture change." But what is culture change? How does it work? Can it be effective? This article presents a novel social psychological framework for intentional culture change-actively and deliberately modifying the mutually reinforcing features of a culture. Synthesizing insights from research and application, it proposes an integrated, evidence-based perspective centered around seven core principles for intentional culture change: Principle 1: People are culturally shaped shapers, so they can be culture changers; Principle 2: Identifying, mapping, and evaluating the key levels of culture helps locate where to target change; Principle 3: Culture change happens in both top-down and bottom-up ways and is more effective when the levels are in alignment; Principle 4: Culture change can be easier when it leverages existing core values and harder when it challenges deep-seated defaults and biases; Principle 5: Culture change typically involves power struggles and identity threats; Principle 6: Cultures interact with one another and change can cause backlash, resistance, and clashes; and Principle 7: Timing and readiness matter. While these principles may be broadly used, here they are applied to the issue of social inequality in the United States. Even though culture change feels particularly daunting in this problem area, it can also be empowering-especially when people leverage evidence-based insights and tools to reimagine and rebuild their cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

From agents to objects: sexist attitudes and neural responses to sexualized targets.

Agency attribution is a hallmark of mind perception; thus, diminished attributions of agency may disrupt social-cognition processes typically elicited by human targets. The current studies examine the effect of perceivers' sexist attitudes on associations of agency with, and neural responses to, images of sexualized and clothed men and women. In Study 1, male (but not female) participants with higher hostile sexism scores more quickly associated sexualized women with first-person action verbs ("handle") and clothed women with third-person action verbs ("handles") than the inverse, as compared to their less sexist peers. In Study 2, hostile sexism correlated negatively with activation of regions associated with mental state attribution-medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, temporal poles-but only when viewing sexualized women. Heterosexual men best recognized images of sexualized female bodies (but not faces), as compared with other targets' bodies; however, neither face nor body recognition was related to hostile sexism, suggesting that the fMRI findings are not explained by more or less attention to sexualized female targets. Diminished mental state attribution is not unique to targets that people prefer to avoid, as in dehumanization of stigmatized people. The current studies demonstrate that appetitive social targets may elicit a similar response depending on perceivers' attitudes toward them.

Differential development of high-level visual cortex correlates with category-specific recognition memory.

High-level visual cortex in humans includes functionally defined regions that preferentially respond to objects, faces and places. It is unknown how these regions develop and whether their development relates to recognition memory. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the development of several functionally defined regions including object (lateral occipital complex, LOC)-, face ('fusiform face area', FFA; superior temporal sulcus, STS)- and place ('parahippocampal place area', PPA)-selective cortices in children (ages 7-11), adolescents (12-16) and adults. Right FFA and left PPA volumes were substantially larger in adults than in children. This development occurred by expansion of FFA and PPA into surrounding cortex and was correlated with improved recognition memory for faces and places, respectively. In contrast, LOC and STS volumes and object-recognition memory remained constant across ages. Thus, the ventral stream undergoes a prolonged maturation that varies temporally across functional regions, is determined by brain region rather than stimulus category, and is correlated with the development of category-specific recognition memory.

The thin blue waveform: Racial disparities in officer prosody undermine institutional trust in the police.

How do routine police encounters build or undermine community trust, and how might they contribute to racial gaps in citizen perceptions of the police? Procedural justice theory posits that officers' interpersonal communication toward the public plays a formative role, but experimental tests of this hypothesis have been constrained by the difficulties of measuring and manipulating this dimension of officer-citizen interactions. Officer-worn body camera recordings provide a novel means to overcome both of these challenges. Across five studies with laboratory and community samples, we use footage from traffic stops to examine how officers communicate to drivers and whether racial disparities in officers' communication erode institutional trust in the police. Specifically, we consider the cumulative effects of one subtle interpersonal cue: an officer's tone of voice. In Studies 1A, 1B, and 1C, participants rated thin slices of officer speech. Participants were blind to the content of the officer's words and the race of their interlocutor, yet they evaluated officers' tone toward White (vs. Black) men more positively. By manipulating participants' exposure to repeated interactions, we demonstrate that even these paraverbal aspects of police interactions shape how citizens construe the police generally (Study 2), and that racial disparities in prosodic cues undermine trust in institutions such as police departments (Study 3). Participants' trust in the police, and personal experiences of fairness, in turn, correlated with their perceptions of officer prosody across studies. Taken together, these data illustrate a cycle through which interpersonal aspects of police encounters erode institutional trust across race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Biological conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries.

The present studies demonstrate that conceiving of racial group membership as biologically determined increases acceptance of racial inequities (Studies 1 and 2) and cools interest in interacting with racial outgroup members (Studies 3-5). These effects were generally independent of racial prejudice. It is argued that when race is cast as a biological marker of individuals, people perceive racial outgroup members as unrelated to the self and therefore unworthy of attention and affiliation. Biological conceptions of race therefore provide justification for a racially inequitable status quo and for the continued social marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups.