If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups.

Nine preregistered studies (n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited. A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters' political and egalitarian beliefs. Finally two novel-groups experiments experiments reveal that advantaged participants' harm misperceptions predict voting for inequality-enhancing policies that financially hurt them and against equality-enhancing policies that financially benefit them. Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making. This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

Detecting Prejudice From Egalitarianism: Why Black Americans Don't Trust White Egalitarians' Claims.

Although White Americans increasingly express egalitarian views, how they express egalitarianism may reveal inegalitarian tendencies and sow mistrust with Black Americans. In the present experiments, Black perceivers inferred likability and trustworthiness and accurately inferred underlying racial attitudes and motivations from White writers' declarations that they are nonprejudiced and egalitarian (Experiments 1 and 2). White writers believed that their egalitarianism seemed more inoffensive and indicative of allyship than was perceived by Black Americans (Experiment 1a). Linguistic analysis revealed that, when inferring racial attitudes and motivations, Black perceivers accurately attended to language emphasizing humanization, support for equal opportunity, personal responsibility, and the idea that equality already exists (Experiment 1b). We found causal evidence that these linguistic cues informed Black Americans' perceptions of White egalitarians (Experiment 2). Suggesting societal costs of these perceptions, White egalitarians' underlying racial beliefs negatively predicted Black participants' actual trust and cooperation in an economic game (Experiment 3). Our experiments (N = 1,335 adults) showed that White Americans' insistence that they are egalitarian itself perpetuates mistrust with Black Americans.

Majority members misperceive even "win-win" diversity policies as unbeneficial to them.

Six studies show that majority members misperceive diversity policies as unbeneficial to their ingroup, even when policies benefit them. Majority members perceived nonzero-sum university admission policies-policies that increase acceptance of both URM (i.e., underrepresented minority) and non-URM applicants-as harmful to their ingroup when merely framed as "diversity" policies. Even for policies lacking a diversity framing (i.e., "leadership" policies), majority members misperceived that their ingroup would not benefit when policies provided relatively greater benefit to URMs, but not when they provided relatively greater benefit to non-URMs. No consistent evidence emerged that these effects were driven by ideological factors: Majority members' misperceptions occurred even when accounting for self-reported beliefs around diversity, hierarchy, race, and politics. Instead, we find that majority group membership itself predicts misperceptions, such that both Black and White participants accurately perceive nonzero-sum diversity policies as also benefiting the majority when participants are represented as members of the minority group. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Implicit Bias Predicts Liking of Ingroup Members Who Are Comfortable With Intergroup Interaction.

We test a novel framework for how ingroup members are perceived during intergroup interaction. Across three experiments, we found that, above and beyond egalitarian attitudes and motivations, White observers' automatic responses to Blacks (i.e., their implicit anti-Black bias) shaped their affiliation toward ingroup targets who appeared comfortable engaging in interracial versus same-race interaction. White observers' implicit anti-Black bias negatively correlated with liking of White targets who were comfortable with Blacks (Experiments 1-3). The relationship between implicit bias and liking varied as a function of targets' nonverbal comfort in interracial interactions (Experiment 1). Specifically, implicit bias negatively correlated with liking of targets when targets' nonverbal behaviors revealed observers felt comfortable with interracial contact, irrespective of the nature of those behaviors (Experiment 2). Finally, the relationship between implicit bias and target liking was mediated by perceived similarity (Experiment 3). Theoretical implications for stigma-by-association, social network homogeneity, and extended contact are discussed.

When bias binds: Effect of implicit outgroup bias on ingroup affiliation.

We tested a novel process we term implicit homophily in which perceivers' implicit outgroup bias shapes their affiliative responses toward ingroup targets with outgroup friends as a function of perceived similarity. Across 4 studies, we tested implicit homophily in the context of racial groups. We found that White participants with higher implicit anti-Black bias reported less affiliative responses toward White targets with Black friends compared with White targets with White friends, and this effect persisted above and beyond the effects of implicit pro-White bias and explicit racial bias (Studies 1-3). We further found evidence that this relationship between implicit anti-Black bias and affiliation exists because participants infer how comfortable targets are around outgroup members (Preliminary Study) and use this information to infer similarity on this dimension (Studies 1-3). Our findings also suggested that stigma transference and expectancy violation were not viable alternative mediators (Preliminary Study and Study 1). Finally, women's implicit anti-Black bias predicted their likelihood of having Facebook friends with Black friends, providing ecological and behavioral evidence of implicit homophily (Study 4). Implications for research on stigma by association, extended contact, affiliation, and network formation are discussed.

Neuroanatomical correlates of the income-achievement gap.

In the United States, the difference in academic achievement between higher- and lower-income students (i.e., the income-achievement gap) is substantial and growing. In the research reported here, we investigated neuroanatomical correlates of this gap in adolescents (N = 58) in whom academic achievement was measured by statewide standardized testing. Cortical gray-matter volume was significantly greater in students from higher-income backgrounds (n = 35) than in students from lower-income backgrounds (n = 23), but cortical white-matter volume and total cortical surface area did not differ significantly between groups. Cortical thickness in all lobes of the brain was greater in students from higher-income than lower-income backgrounds. Greater cortical thickness, particularly in temporal and occipital lobes, was associated with better test performance. These results represent the first evidence that cortical thickness in higher- and lower-income students differs across broad swaths of the brain and that cortical thickness is related to scores on academic-achievement tests.