Racial Attention Deficit
Sheen S. Levine1,2 *, Charlotte Reypens1
, and David Stark2,3
1 The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
2 Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
3 University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
* To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected]
Teaser
Americans make poor decisions because they ignore their Black peers — a large
experimental study shows and suggests a remedy.
Abstract
Despite concerted efforts towards equity in organizations and elsewhere, minority members
report that they are often ignored and their contributions undervalued. Against this
backdrop, we conduct a multi-year experimental study to investigate patterns of attention,
using a large, gender-balanced sample of White working-age Americans. The findings
provide causal evidence of a racial attention deficit: Even when in their best interest, White
Americans pay less attention to Black peers. In a baseline study, we assign an incentivized
puzzle to participants and examine their willingness to follow the example of their White and
Black peers. White participants presume that Black peers are less competent — and fail to
learn from their choices. We then test two interventions: Providing information about past
accomplishments reduces the disparity in evaluations of Black peers, but the racial attention
deficit persists. When Whites can witness the accomplishments of Black peers — rather than
being told about them — the racial attention deficit subsides. We suggest that such a deficit
can explain racial gaps documented in science, education, health, and law.
Racial Attention Deficit
Sheen S. Levine1,2 *, Charlotte Reypens1
, and David Stark2,3
1 The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
2 Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
3 University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
* To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected]
Teaser
Americans make poor decisions because they ignore their Black peers — a large
experimental study shows and suggests a remedy.
Abstract
Despite concerted efforts towards equity in organizations and elsewhere, minority members
report that they are often ignored and their contributions undervalued. Against this
backdrop, we conduct a multi-year experimental study to investigate patterns of attention,
using a large, gender-balanced sample of White working-age Americans. The findings
provide causal evidence of a racial attention deficit: Even when in their best interest, White
Americans pay less attention to Black peers. In a baseline study, we assign an incentivized
puzzle to participants and examine their willingness to follow the example of their White and
Black peers. White participants presume that Black peers are less competent — and fail to
learn from their choices. We then test two interventions: Providing information about past
accomplishments reduces the disparity in evaluations of Black peers, but the racial attention
deficit persists. When Whites can witness the accomplishments of Black peers — rather than
being told about them — the racial attention deficit subsides. We suggest that such a deficit
can explain racial gaps documented in science, education, health, and law.
Racial Attention Deficit
Sheen S. Levine1,2 *, Charlotte Reypens1
, and David Stark2,3
1 The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
2 Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
3 University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
* To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected]
Teaser
Americans make poor decisions because they ignore their Black peers — a large
experimental study shows and suggests a remedy.
Abstract
Despite concerted efforts towards equity in organizations and elsewhere, minority members
report that they are often ignored and their contributions undervalued. Against this
backdrop, we conduct a multi-year experimental study to investigate patterns of attention,
using a large, gender-balanced sample of White working-age Americans. The findings
provide causal evidence of a racial attention deficit: Even when in their best interest, White
Americans pay less attention to Black peers. In a baseline study, we assign an incentivized
puzzle to participants and examine their willingness to follow the example of their White and
Black peers. White participants presume that Black peers are less competent — and fail to
learn from their choices. We then test two interventions: Providing information about past
accomplishments reduces the disparity in evaluations of Black peers, but the racial attention
deficit persists. When Whites can witness the accomplishments of Black peers — rather than
being told about them — the racial attention deficit subsides. We suggest that such a deficit
can explain racial gaps documented in science, education, health, and law.
Recent violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders sadly has deep roots in the history of the United States.
Abstract
While prior research shows how community-based organizations (CBO’s) create new social ties and solidarities, we know less about CBO’s that formalize preexisting relationships of care. Analyzing transgender nonprofits as a strategic case, this article develops the concept of kinship organizations: organizations that incorporate norms, networks, and resources from kinship systems into a formal organization that provides regular social services. Drawing on 7 months of ethnography and 36 formal interviews with staff and clients, I explore how transgender kinship organizations function, develop, and impact broader transgender community. Kinship organizations are highly responsive to crisis, are able to leverage personal and organizational resources, and are therefore capable of providing personalized rapid-response care to very precarious transgender people. On the other hand, subsuming kinship within a nonprofit transforms relationships of mutual care into unidirectional service relationships and relationships of chosen family into work-based hierarchies. This account of kinship organizations contributes to the theory on organizational development and provides new conceptual tools for analyzing boundaries between organizations and communities.
Columbia University will develop a model curriculum—“Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy”—to address racial inequality in the criminal justice system thanks to a $5 million, three-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In partnership with community organizations and higher education institutions across the country, the upper-level curriculum seeks to reimagine punishment in the United States.
The Department of Sociology congratulates Prof. Shamus Khan in receiving the American Sociological Association Charles Tilly Best Article Award for his article “How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic.“ American Journal of Sociology 123(6): 1743-83, co-authored with Fabien Accominotti and Adam Storer.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest public health crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918, but it will not be the last. Disaster research is often by necessity retrospective, providing accounts of past actions and ongoing recoveries. The temporal profile of the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity for social research in the middle of an unfolding crisis, providing contemporaneous insights into risk perception and sensemaking under duress, community and organizational resilience, transformations in social structure, and real time adaptations to severe economic and social dislocations. Concentrating on New York City, this study uses surveys, interviews, and written testimonials to create a contemporaneous record of the city’s battle with COVID-19 across the epidemic curve. New York is a critical site for understanding the course of this pandemic because it was an early epicenter of the disease in the U.S., because it has a robust municipal emergency management system with deep experience of past disasters health-related and otherwise, and because it is home to one of the nation’s strongest urban healthcare systems. We must rigorously document this emergency to better understand how it is unfolding, to better inform the recovery, and to learn lessons that will aid our fight against the next pandemic. This project does exactly that, by capturing a diversity of perspectives over the course of the pandemic, from its early stages to the time when it inevitably recedes.
Read full article here.