Most people would probably agree that “women can’t drive” is a sexist statement. But what about saying that “women are nurturing”? Isn’t that just a nice compliment?
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Gender and sexual minorities in the United States still face discrimination and a number of challenges.
In this blog post, I discuss how people respond to information about their implicit racial bias—automatic attitudes and beliefs that favor one ethnic group over another. Although people can be defensive, emerging research suggests there are benefits to accepting implicit racial bias and being aware of this subtle prejudice.
In this blog post, I discuss what information people use to decide whether a behavior constitutes discrimination. Similar to the way people organize categories and identify objects, I review research showing that people rely on prototypes when deciding what is and is not discrimination.
In this blog post, I describe new evidence that thinking about political ideology on a single liberal/left to conservative/right spectrum masks important nuances in the origins of political ideologies and in the way that people apply those ideologies to important judgments, including those of other people (i.e., prejudice).
In this blog post, I will discuss new research in political psychology that is changing our understanding of what prejudice is, and who is prejudiced.
Even though the death of Trayvon Martin drew much public attention in the last year and a half, the shooting of an unarmed, innocent black male is in no way an isolated case in America. Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old African-American man in Florida, was recently killed by police officers when he was looking for help after crashing his car. Roy Middleton, a 60-year-old Florida man, was crippled after the sheriff’s deputies mistook him for a car thief and shot him 15 times in his own driveway.
Humans are passionate creatures. Our passions drive us, gives us a sense of belonging, and unite us as few other things can. Still, there are only a couple of passions that have been constants down the ages, passions that people from every place and culture can agree on. Love is one, but another is that "those no-good bastards over there are trouble." Of course, we quibble endlessly over the exact definition of "those" -- every culture, pretty much, has had a different group in mind.
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