Press
Looking for Similarities Can Bring Marginalized Groups Together
August 2017- Read the article at Behavioral Scientist
Across five studies and looking at intergroup relations between four different disadvantaged groups, we find that highlighting a commonality between two groups’ experiences of discrimination, such as civil rights issues experienced by both racial minorities and sexual minorities in the U.S., results in increased positivity between these two groups (compared to a control condition in which no connection between the groups is made salient).
Why are people still racist?
August 2017- Read the article at Washington Post
“We often assume that it takes parents actively teaching their kids, for them to be racist. The truth is that unless parents actively teach kids not to be racists, they will be,” said Jennifer Richeson, a Yale University social psychologist. “This is not the product of some deep-seated, evil heart that is cultivated. It comes from the environment, the air all around us.”
White fear of demographic change is a powerful psychological force
January 2017- Read the full article at Vox
Richeson’s studies on interracial interactions had taught her that when people are in the majority, the sense of their race is dormant. But the prospect of being in the minority can suddenly make white identity — and all the historical privilege that comes with it — salient. And, she guessed, the prospect of losing majority status was likely to make people (perhaps unconsciously) uneasy.
The Great White Hope
May 2014- Read the full article at The New York Times
Could America Become Mississippi
April 2014- Read the full article at Slate
Working at Northwestern University, psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson apply that question to demographic change, and, in particular, to white Americans vis-a-vis the prospect of a United States where the majority of Americans are drawn from today’s minorities. Does a threat to one’s status as the demographic “in-group” increase political conservatism? The answer, in short, is yes.