Research Interests
The majority of my research has focused on issues of classism and sexism. Specifically, I have investigated issues of implicit gender stereotyping as it relates to the effect of the media, the manner in which advertising may evoke hostile or benevolent sexism, the relation between social class stereotyping and stereotype threat, cross-cultural dehumanization of low-income individuals, terror management and political ideology, the interaction between classism and stereotyping on victim blame of low-income women, attitudes toward race and gender during Obama’s presidency, and differences between single-sex and mixed-sex environments. As such, my research incorporates a number of different domains: media, gender, class, ethnicity, poverty, and politics, and often focuses on the intersections of these different fields.
Recent and Ongoing Research Projects
Low-income Americans and Stereotype Threat
While first studying issues related to prejudice, I became aware of the lack of literature surrounding issues of income and stereotyping. Although Croizet & Claire (1998) found the low-income French students succumbed to stereotype threat similarly to other stigmatized populations (see Steele, 1997), their work was critiqued for being specific to France. Critics argued that the same would not hold true in America, a country where one can simply “work hard to get ahead,” although currently, parents’ income is the main predictor of how well one will perform on standardized tests, with low-income students performing approximately 100 points below high-income students on the SAT (College Board, 2005).
In one of my first major research lines I designed a stereotype threat study to test the prediction that low-income Americans are affected by stereotyping and prejudice. In addition to employing traditional stereotype threat manipulations of test diagnosticity, we predicted that “outing” oneself as a low-income student in a society that prides itself on being classless while openly stereotyping and disparaging low-income individuals (see Bullock, Wyche, & Williams, 2001), would further undermine academic performance. To test this, I recruited high and low-income students from several New York City colleges. Participants all completed the same 15 difficult questions from the verbal section of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). Half of the participants were led to believe that it was a test of “verbal intelligence” whereas the other half believed that it was a test of perception. Additionally, half of the participants completed a demographic form prior to the test that included, among filler items, their parents’ income and occupation. The other half completed the form after taking the test. Following the GRE, all participants completed a measure of self-confidence.
As predicted, the experimental manipulations had no effect on the high-income students; however, the low-income participants (across ethnicities) in the threatening conditions (with a test described as diagnostic of intelligence, identity made salient beforehand) performed significantly worse than high-income students and low-income students who were in the nonthreatening conditions. Low-income students in the nonthreatening conditions performed as well as their high-income peers. Interestingly, the manipulation of identity (reporting income information before taking the test versus after) created the largest effect. Similar results were found for the confidence measure. With performance held constant, low-income students had the least amount of confidence in the most threatening condition.
This work was supported by a Clara Mayo Grant from the Society for Psychological Study of Social Issues, and was published in Social Justice Research (2008). It has been cited in such works as Fiske, S. T. (2010). Interpersonal stratification: Status, power, and subordination. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey, (Eds.). Handbook of social psychology, Vol 2 (5th ed.). (pp. 941-982). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Recently, I wrote more generally about the barriers low-income students may face in higher education in the Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies.
Mixed-Gender vs. Single-Gender Environments
Research conducted on the academic benefits of single-gender schooling has provided mixed results (Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Chouinarda, Vezeau & Bouffard, 2008 ; Kessels & Hannover, 2008). While the debate continues, other issues that are relevant to single-gender schooling have gone largely unexplored. To date, there has been little research on the social, personal, and emotional impacts of single-gender environments. Egbochuku & Aihie (2009) found that single-gender environments lead to a more positive self-concept for girls, and previous research supports the idea that intangible aspects of women’s identity (i.e., confidence, leadership skills, egalitarian beliefs, etc.), may be positively influenced in a single-gender college (Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004).
However, I and my student lab members proposed that aspects of the self that can be visually compared will be negatively influenced in a single-gender college. One such aspect of the self is body-image. Young women are under tremendous pressure to conform to thin body weight ideals, and social comparison with peers and the media plays a large role in body satisfaction (Grogan, Williams & Conner, 1996; Shomaker & Furman, 2007). Since women at single-gender colleges are constantly surrounded by other women with whom they can visually compare themselves, we predict that students at a women’s college will have greater body dissatisfaction and increased self-objectification as compared to female students at a co-ed college.
To test the hypothesis, female students at a women’s college and a co-ed college completed measures of body satisfaction and state and trait self-objectification. We predicted that although there would be no significant difference between students at both schools in the 1st year, there would be a significant difference in scores in the 4th year sample, with participants at the women’s college showing a greater disparity between their actual/ideal body weight and increased self-objectification. We found this result, but in the opposite direction – that is, women at a women’s college had a better body image in their 4th year that women at mixed-sex schools for whom body satisfaction decreased.
This article was published in Sex Roles.
Following the previous project on single-gender and mixed-gender environments, a current project continues to examine the impact of context on sexism. In this study participants from a mixed-gender college and a women's college read a vignette about an average student (“target”) from one of the two schools and then completed measures of perceived warmth and competence as well as benevolent and hostile sexism. A statistically significant interaction effect between college attended and condition demonstrated that the mixed-sex college participants rated members of the women's college as lower in perceived competence. These effects were particularly strong for 4th year students. Participants from the women's college did not rate the two targets differently. Additionally, there was a main effect of condition so that participants rated the women's college target as higher in warmth. We also found that the study participant’s own college had an effect on results: participants from the mixed-sex college endorsed more hostile sexism.
I received a Psi Chi Advisor Research Grant to work on this study with students, and as such, we are currently in the process of running additional participants from a mixed-sex “neutral” (non-affiliated school) to see if the differences in attitudes were specific to the “sister-school”/affiliated-school relationship. I presented this work at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology with my student assistants as a co-presenters. The manuscript is currently in preparation.
Low-income Rape Survivors and Victim-Blame
Combining my interest in gender and social class, I designed this study to examine the extent to which low-income women are perceived as being promiscuous and how such stereotyping could lead to victim blame for low-income rape survivors. Evidence has shown that poor women are generally perceived as being lazy, promiscuous, and immoral (Bullock, Wyche, & Williams, 2001). Poor women violate cultural norms of proper behavior (Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, & Tagler, 2001), and welfare recipients are the only group who across cultures are seen as being low in warmth and competence, as well as disliked and disrespected (Fiske, Xu, Cuddy, & Glick, 1999). Based on these findings, I predicted that low-income women are more susceptible to stereotyping, which would mediate (that is, affect) victim blame in a rape situation. I also predicted that participants’ own classist attitudes will moderate the results significantly. Participants were recruited nation-wide through on online data collection site and randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions participants were led to believe that they were reading a real police file that described a heterosexual acquaintance rape. The files were identical except for a few subtle manipulations of the victim’s socioeconomic status (SES). In the low-SES condition, the victim was described as a cashier who lived in an apartment, and in the high-SES condition the victim was described as an accountant who lived in a house. Following the police file, participants completed an open-ended question about their opinions, rated the victim on a number of positive and negative stereotypic traits, completed the Attitudes Towards Rape Victims Scale (ARVS; Ward, 1988) and the Case Reaction Questionnaire (CRQ; Schultz & Schneider, 1991). In an ostensibly unrelated task, participants completed the Classist Attitude Scale (CAS; Hoyt, Doyon, & Dietz-Uhler, 1998).
Linguistic analysis of the open-ended question revealed that participants who scored high in classism were significantly more likely to minimize the rape when recounting the events of the attack of the low-SES victim. These participants did not minimize the high-SES victim’s attack, and participants who scored low in classism did not use minimization strategies in either condition.
In the measure of the blame and negative attitudes, overall, participants saw the target (victim) as more blameworthy and held more derogatory attitudes towards her when she was of low-SES rather than high-SES. Additionally, the low-SES target attracted more negative and less positive stereotyping. Because of the specific hypothesis about the stereotyping of low-SES women as promiscuous, the score for the rating of this specific trait was analyzed. This revealed a very strong effect of condition, indicating that compared to the high-SES target, the low-SES target was perceived as much more promiscuous. A series of statistical regression analyses confirmed that the significant effect of condition on blame disappeared when the positive and the negative stereotyping scores were included as predictors. Together with my student lab members, I recently ran a follow-up study that examined perceptions of perpetrator guilt.
The initial study was part of my dissertation and received the Alfred J. Marrow Dissertation Award in Psychology. The follow-up study was supported by the Women’s Voices Research-to-Course Grant. This research was published in the journal Sexualization, Media, and Society.
Race and Class-Based Dehumanization
The purpose of this study was to investigate the content of stereotypes of people from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. In particular, it examined whether low-SES Whites are subtly dehumanized, such that they are denied attributes that distinguish humans from animals in general, and apes in particular. The study was run in collaboration with colleagues in Australia (Nicholas Haslam and Steve Loughnan) and the United Kingdom (Robbie Sutton). We hypothesized that a low-SES White American group ("white trash") would be stereotyped as lacking uniquely human personality traits, and that the traits that participants deny to apes relative to humans will be the same ones they deny to "white trash" relative to other Americans.
This denial of uniquely human attributes is particularly evident in perceptions of groups that are seen as primitive or backward. For example, Saminaden, Loughnan, and Haslam (in press) showed that people from traditional societies were unconsciously seen as lacking uniquely human traits and likened to animals more than people from modern industrialized societies. Research by Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson (2008) also found that White Americans unconsciously associated African Americans with apes. The purpose of the proposed study is to extend this work by assessing whether a comparable likening of a group to apes and a denial of uniquely human traits can be observed for an ethnically "White" group.
Consistent with the hypothesis, we found the same pattern of subtle denial of uniquely human attributes and likening to apes in all three different cultural contexts. This article was published in Social Psychology.
Another study examining dehumanization across involved an extensive content analysis of newspaper coverage of protests that involved primarily White participants or primarily Black participants. A second component of this study involved an experiment to determine how Black and White protestors are perceived differently in protests situations. I received a Grants-In-Aids Research Grant from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues to conduct this research and it is currently in preparation.
Attitudes about race, gender, and ethnicity during the 2008-2020 elections
In a longitudinal study that I began running in November 2008 I measured attitudes toward race, gender, ethnicity, and perceived personality traits of the candidates. I and my student lab members collected data each Oct.-Dec. and recently collected our last wave of data in Nov. 2016. There were several hypotheses regarding changes in overall attitudes before and after each election, and changes in attitudes from 2008 to 2016. Another hypothesis was that racism and sexism would predict support for the 2008 candidates and the 2016 candidates. Results showed that during the 2008 election racism did predict support for Obama and Biden, and racism and benevolent sexism predicted support for McCain and Palin. During the 2012 election racism did not predict support for Obama, but benevolent sexism did predict support for Romney, Biden, and Ryan. During the 2016 and 2020 election racism and hostile sexism predicted support for the candidates. This research was published in the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
In a related article, I examine how the 2016 election motivated more women, particularly white women, to mobilize politically. This research was co-authored with Ernesto Verdeja and published in the journal Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality & Diversity.
Select Citations
Kraus, M W., Piff, P. K., Mendoza-Denton, R., Rheinschmidt, M. L., & Keltner, D. (2012). Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor. Psychological Review, 119, 546-572.
Fiske, S.T., Moya, M., Russell, A.M., & Bearns, C. (2012). The secret handshake: Trust in cross-class encounters. In S.T. Fiske & H.R. Markus (Eds.) Facing Social Class: How societal rank influence interaction. (pp. 234-252). New York, NY: Russle Sage Foundation
Stephens, N.M., Markus, H. R., & Fryberg, S. A. (2012). Understanding Social Class Disparities in Education and Health: Individual, Structural, and Sociocultural Models of Behavior, Psychological Review
Logel, C. R., & Walton, G.M. (2012). "Unleashing Latent Ability: Implications of Stereotype Threat for College Admissions," Educational Psychologist, 47, 42-50.
Croizet, J-C., & Millet, M. (2012). Social class and test performance: From stereotype threat to symbolic violence and vice versa. In J-C. Croizet & M. Millet, Eds., Stereotype threat: Theory, process, and application, (pgs. 188-201). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Konan, P. N., Chatard, A., Selimbegović, L., Mugny, G., & Moraru, A. (2011). Deflecting stereotype threat through downward comparison: When comparison with immigrants boosts the performance of stigmatized native students. Social Justice Research, 24, 191-205.
Johnson, S. E., Richeson, J. A., & Finkel, E. J. (2011). Middle class and marginal? Socioeconomic status, stigma, and self-regulation at an elite university. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 838-852.
Guo, S., & Jamal, Z. (2011). Toward inclusive education: Embracing cultural diversity in lifelong learning. In S. Jackson Ed. Innovations in Lifelong Learning: Critical perspectives on diversity, participation, and vocational learning (pgs. 34-48). New York, NY, US: Routledge.
Hubbs, N. (2011). 'Redneck Woman' and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion. Southern Cultures, 17, 44-70.
Baumgartner, L. M., & Johnson-Bailey, J. (2011). A field of flowers and broken glass: Contrasting stories of “race,” participation and higher education. In S. Jackson Ed. Innovations in Lifelong Learning: Critical perspectives on diversity, participation, and vocational learning (pgs. 111-125). New York, NY, US: Routledge.
Rössel, J., & Pape, S. (2010). Was ist ein typischer Arbeiter? Stereotype über soziale Schichten.
Gruppendynamik und Organisationsberatung, 41, 57-71.
Fiske, S. T. (2010). Interpersonal stratification: Status, power, and subordination. In S. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey, (Eds.). Handbook of social psychology, Vol 2 (5th ed.). (pp. 941-982). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Burgess, D. J., Warren, J., Phelan, S., Dovidio, J., & van Ryn, M. (2010). Stereotype threat and health disparities: What medical educators and future physicians need to know. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 25, S169-S177
Kudrna, L., Furnham, A., & Swami, V. (2010). The influence of social class salience on self-assessed intelligence. Social Behavior and Personality,38, 859-864.
Désert, M., Préaux, M., & Jund, R. (2009). So young and already victims of stereotype threat: Socio-economic status and performance of 6 to 9 years old children on Raven's progressive matrices. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 24, 207-218.
Fiske, S.T., Moya, M., Russell, A.M., & Bearns, C. (2012). The secret handshake: Trust in cross-class encounters. In S.T. Fiske & H.R. Markus (Eds.) Facing Social Class: How societal rank influence interaction. (pp. 234-252). New York, NY: Russle Sage Foundation
Stephens, N.M., Markus, H. R., & Fryberg, S. A. (2012). Understanding Social Class Disparities in Education and Health: Individual, Structural, and Sociocultural Models of Behavior, Psychological Review
Logel, C. R., & Walton, G.M. (2012). "Unleashing Latent Ability: Implications of Stereotype Threat for College Admissions," Educational Psychologist, 47, 42-50.
Croizet, J-C., & Millet, M. (2012). Social class and test performance: From stereotype threat to symbolic violence and vice versa. In J-C. Croizet & M. Millet, Eds., Stereotype threat: Theory, process, and application, (pgs. 188-201). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Konan, P. N., Chatard, A., Selimbegović, L., Mugny, G., & Moraru, A. (2011). Deflecting stereotype threat through downward comparison: When comparison with immigrants boosts the performance of stigmatized native students. Social Justice Research, 24, 191-205.
Johnson, S. E., Richeson, J. A., & Finkel, E. J. (2011). Middle class and marginal? Socioeconomic status, stigma, and self-regulation at an elite university. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 838-852.
Guo, S., & Jamal, Z. (2011). Toward inclusive education: Embracing cultural diversity in lifelong learning. In S. Jackson Ed. Innovations in Lifelong Learning: Critical perspectives on diversity, participation, and vocational learning (pgs. 34-48). New York, NY, US: Routledge.
Hubbs, N. (2011). 'Redneck Woman' and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion. Southern Cultures, 17, 44-70.
Baumgartner, L. M., & Johnson-Bailey, J. (2011). A field of flowers and broken glass: Contrasting stories of “race,” participation and higher education. In S. Jackson Ed. Innovations in Lifelong Learning: Critical perspectives on diversity, participation, and vocational learning (pgs. 111-125). New York, NY, US: Routledge.
Rössel, J., & Pape, S. (2010). Was ist ein typischer Arbeiter? Stereotype über soziale Schichten.
Gruppendynamik und Organisationsberatung, 41, 57-71.
Fiske, S. T. (2010). Interpersonal stratification: Status, power, and subordination. In S. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey, (Eds.). Handbook of social psychology, Vol 2 (5th ed.). (pp. 941-982). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Burgess, D. J., Warren, J., Phelan, S., Dovidio, J., & van Ryn, M. (2010). Stereotype threat and health disparities: What medical educators and future physicians need to know. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 25, S169-S177
Kudrna, L., Furnham, A., & Swami, V. (2010). The influence of social class salience on self-assessed intelligence. Social Behavior and Personality,38, 859-864.
Désert, M., Préaux, M., & Jund, R. (2009). So young and already victims of stereotype threat: Socio-economic status and performance of 6 to 9 years old children on Raven's progressive matrices. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 24, 207-218.