(Absent) Allyship in STEM: Can Psychological Standing Increase Prejudice Confrontation?

Abstract

The current research focuses on the role that allies can play in improving the experiences of Black and Latinx students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) contexts. Using an experience sampling design, study 1 shows that such students report negative experiences in STEM learning contexts and that bystanders rarely engage in allyship. Study 2 suggests that participants perceive the experiences described by Black and Latinx students in study 1 as negative and somewhat urgent, but do not feel personal responsibility to act. Studies 3 and 4 assess the effectiveness of interventions aimed at enhancing personal responsibility for confronting prejudice and engaging in allyship. Study 3 reveals that enhancing a bystander’s sense of psychological standing can increase prejudice confrontation, and study 4 extends this phenomenon by showing that fellow bystanders’ (not just targets’) appeals to other bystanders’ psychological standing also evoke action. Overall, this work advances research on allyship in STEM contexts by integrating the Confronting Prejudiced Responses (CPR) model with theories of subtle discrimination.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Experiential Information

Examples of the negative identity-based events students described include, “It was just a little weird today because I usually sit with the other black girls in my class and today they weren’t there so I sat alone in the front. The class time is spent working with people around you to answer questions so I just ended up doing them by myself,” and “The professor (a woman) kept asking the group of girls in my class to participate. She said the girls were too quiet and the boys were the only ones participating. I felt a bit disappointed that I was not participating and representing the group of girls in my class. I did not want to preserve the stereotype that boys are more knowledgeable about science than girls, but I did so by not participating,” and “While asking for further explanation on a math problem a student two rows behind me whispered “they can never understand what’s going on.” These example descriptions demonstrate how negative experiences may be occurring—specifically, minoritized participants reported rude interpersonal interactions with other students and teaching assistants/professors, as well as social avoidance and exclusion by their classmates, and feelings of incompetence. It is noteworthy that participants did not typically indicate that they believed these negative events were race-related (M = 1.76, SD = 1.33) or discriminatory (M = 1.46, SD = 1.03).

Appendix 2

The focus in studies 3 and 4 is on psychological standing as an intervention through which to increase prejudice confrontation. To further substantiate and justify this focus, we considered two alternative mechanisms. The first alternative mechanism for intervention is to enhance a sense of superordinate group identity (Turner, 1981). Superordinate identity refers to uniting diverse individuals and encouraging them to view themselves as a team working toward a common goal. Though identity may be portrayed as a fixed state, self-categorization theory (Hogg & Turner, 1987; Turner et al., 1994) explains that the way in which individuals conceptualize identity may be a more fluid process than once believed. They suggest that changes to self-concept occur often across varying social situations and may shift to match the present situation (Hogg & Turner, 1987). Sharing a group identity also implicates responsibility. When a member of one’s in-group (vs. out-group) is harmed, people are more likely to see the transgression as affecting them personally. Creating a superordinate identity reduces conflict because it requires members of both the in-group and out-group to eliminate group boundaries based on race, gender, or other factors, so that intergroup concerns become intragroup concerns (Turner, 1981, p. 99). Changing categorization of group members from “they” to “we” may be a powerful tool in reducing racism (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2005). Even when racial identity is particularly salient, a sense of superordinate group membership leads to greater interracial trust, acceptance, and support (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1999).

Superordinate group identity has been studied in emergent situations to understand how bystanders respond to helping both in-group and out-group members. When the victim of an event is believed to be an in-group member, individuals rate the event as more personally threatening or more likely to affect their personal lives. This increases the likelihood of helpful behaviors (Stapel et al., 1994). Researchers studied this phenomenon in a large group of soccer fans and found that bystanders were more likely to help an injured person who was wearing their preferred soccer team’s shirt than a stranger wearing a rival team’s shirt (Levine et al., 2005). Dovidio et al. (1991) introduced the arousal cost-reward model, which helps to explain why creating a superordinate identity may increase helping behaviors in teams. The arousal cost-reward model describes superordinate identity as a “a sense of connectedness or a categorization of another person as a member of one’s own group” (p. 102). When individuals identify as a superordinate group, they perceive more similarities between group members and an increased feeling of responsibility for the welfare of the group (Dovidio et al., 1991). The increase in felt responsibility is said to increase the perceived consequences associated with not helping a victim, which may lead to an increased likelihood of helping a targeted individual (Levine et al., 2005).

This phenomenon extends to non-emergent situations as well. Dovidio et al. (1997) examined how group identity affects prejudice reduction and prosocial behavior in university students and found that students were more likely to help fellow students on a research project when they counted that student as an in-group member. The superordinate group condition reminds participants that they have a common goal and that each member is responsible for doing their part to achieve the desired result. Personal responsibility increases when individuals believe that the group’s outcome depends on them (Brown & Wade, 1987). It follows that a superordinate group identity may encourage confrontation of discrimination.

The second alternative mechanism of intervention we consider is guilt. Guilt, as an emotion representing regret, can be associated with prosocial or reparative behavior (Baumeister et al., 1994). According to Baumeister et al. (1994), guilt motivates relationship- and equity-enhancing behavior. Arising out of interpersonal transgressions—including, potentially, witnessed discrimination—guilt may give rise to attempts to repair broken trust or interpersonal bonds. For example, Lindsey et al. (2019) found that egalitarian motivation increased for diversity training program participants who were asked to reflect on a time they wished they responded differently to discrimination that they witnessed. The experience of reflecting on one’s regret seemed to prompt or prime internal goals about being egalitarian. It stands to reason that experiencing such regret might also increase the likelihood that bystanders will confront discrimination. Thus, we conducted a study to explore the relative effectiveness of psychological standing versus superordinate group identity and guilt interventions before moving forward with the third study in this paper.

Alternative Interventions Study

A total of 221 student participants from an academic institution in the Southern United States took part in this study. We excluded 19 responses because they had duplicate IP addresses, and 27 for participants failing to complete the survey, and two participants who did not report their race. Thus, the final sample included 173 students (57% women; 37% Asian, 10% Black, 10% Hispanic/Latino, 13% multiracial, 30% White; 41% freshmen, 20% sophomores, 27% juniors, 12% seniors. Percentages may not sum to 100 due to rounding).

To begin, participants were told that they would be imagining themselves in “two first-hand accounts of college students’ experiences in their classes.” Before presenting these scenarios, participants were primed with a control or one of three different manipulations intended to heighten participants’ willingness to respond. In all cases, the prime began with, “You notice that your STEM classmate has been treated negatively because of their race (e.g., excluded from study groups, ignored by professor).” After this, participants read one of the following four reactions: (1) “Some people may think it is not their place to stand up; however, we think it IS your place to stand up. You are the right person to take a stand if you see inequity” (psychological standing condition), (2) “We are all coming from the same university and need to work together to keep all of us afloat. If one of us does well, we all do well. We are aligned toward succeeding and being treated equally” (superordinate group identity condition), (3) “Sometimes people don’t speak up or intervene when they can and then later feel guilty. Think of a time when you witnessed this kind of behavior—what do you wish you had done differently?” (guilt condition), or (4) added nothing else (control condition).

After this prime, participants were asked to imagine themselves in two scenarios. The first was to imagine that “you witness your STEM classmate (who is African-American) being talked down to when asking for help and clarification on confusing topics.” The second was to imagine “observing a Latina classmate discussing how a phylogeny tree works to you and a White classmate. The White classmate responds aloud that she ‘is well spoken for a Mexican girl.’” Both of these scenarios represented actual incidents cited by real targets of discrimination in study 1. We chose two scenarios so that results could not be attributable to any idiosyncratic results of a single scenario. Using a 7-point Likert-type scale anchored by 1 Strongly Disagree and 7 Strongly Agree, participants rated both of the scenarios on the extent to which they would “feel responsible to act.”

A mixed-model ANCOVA controlling for participant race (coded as Black, Hispanic or Latinx, White, Asian, or multiracial, with White as the reference level) yielded a marginally significant effect of the intervention manipulations, F(3, 165) = 2.35, p = 0.07, suggesting that, overall, the manipulations we used may not have increased perceived responsibility very effectively. Neither superordinate identity⁸ (Estimated [Est.] M = 6.05, standard error [SE] = 0.14) nor psychological standing (Est. M = 5.97, SE = 0.14) significantly statistically increased participants’ reports of perceived responsibility compared to the control condition (Est. M = 5.84, SE = 0.15), for superordinate identity vs. control: p = 0.74, Cohen’s d (95% CI) = 0.33 (− 0.32, 0.98), for psychological standing vs. control: p = 0.93, Cohen’s d (95% CI) = 0.21 (− 0.45, 0.86). Furthermore, our guilt manipulation was the least effective (Est. M = 5.56, SE = 0.14), revealing an even lower estimated mean relative to that in the control condition, although the differences between the guilt manipulation and other conditions were not significant, for guilt vs. control: p = 0.52, Cohen’s d (95% CI) =  − 0.45 (− 1.11, 0.20), for guilt vs. psychological standing: p = 0.17, Cohen’s d (95% CI) =  − 0.66 (− 1.29, − 0.02), and for guilt vs. superordinate identity: p = 0.07, Cohen’s d (95% CI) =  − 0.79 (− 1.42, − 0.15). Interestingly, all conditions exhibited relatively high estimated means (i.e., above the scale midpoint of 4), implying that participants did feel responsible to intervene when imagining a hypothetical instance of racial bias. However, because responses to a hypothetical scenario are not necessarily identical to responses in an actual opportunity for bystander intervention, our subsequent studies rely on actual situations involving racism in STEM contexts. These data guided us to drop guilt and instead focus on the intervention of psychological standing and superordinate group identity in a more ecologically valid, synchronous context for study 3.