Is It How You Look or Speak That Matters? - An Experimental Study Exploring the Mechanisms of Ethnic Discrimination

Using a unique laboratory experiment where subjects are asked to guess the test performance of candidates presented by facial portraits and voice messages, this paper explores the following questions: Are beliefs about performance affected by if a candidate is perceived to have looks that are non-stereotypical for the dominant population and do these beliefs change if the candidate has native-like versus accented speech? The experiment is conducted in Sweden and the results show that candidates not perceived as stereotypically Swedish are considered to be worse performers. These beliefs are found in within-gender but not in cross-gender evaluations and are not eliminated when additional performance-related information about the candidates is provided. When candidates are presented by both looks and speech, differential evaluations based on looks disappear. Instead, we find strong negative beliefs about performance for candidates that speak Swedish with a foreign accent implying that ethnic stereotypes associated with speech override stereotypes associated with appearance. The negative beliefs associated with foreign-accented speech are not supported by corresponding mean differences in the candidates’ actual test performance.Experiment; Appearance; Speech; Beliefs; Performance; Stereotypes

An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs

In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of P iff P bears the “essence” of G—whatever this essence is—which is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features associated with G and predicted of P. Since there is no essence that is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features of a social group, slurs have null-extension, and consequently, many sentences containing them are either meaningless or false. After giving a detailed outline of my theory, I show that it receives strong linguistic support. In particular, it can account for a wide range of linguistic cases that are regarded as challenging, central data for any theory of slurs. Finally, I show that my theory also receives convergent support from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics

Motivated political reasoning: The formation of belief-value constellations

We study the causal relationship between moral values ("ought" statements) and factual beliefs ("is" statements) and show that, contrary to predictions of orthodox Bayesian models, values exert an influence on beliefs. This effect is mediated by prior political leanings and, thus, contributes to increasing polarization in beliefs about facts. We study this process of motivated political reasoning in a preregistered online experiment with a nationally representative sample of 1,500 individuals in the US. Additionally, we show that subjects do not distort their beliefs in response to financial incentives to do so, suggesting that deep values exert a stronger motivational force

Cultivating Color-blindness?: The Impact of TV-viewing, Racial Policy Reasoning, and Colorblind Racism on Opposition toward Affirmative Action Policy

I examine the effect of television viewing and ideological orientations associated with “modern” racism such as minimization of the impact of racial discrimination and individual attribution on opposition toward preferential hiring of Blacks. Using cross-sectional General Social Survey (GSS) responses from U.S. adults between 2004 and 2010, I estimate ordered logistic regression models predicting attitudes toward preferential hiring of Blacks. Additionally, I compare agreement with key tenets of abstract liberalism to the findings of previous policy reasoning studies to determine the importance of these attitudes in predicting support for affirmative action policy. In this study, I aim to address the potential real-world implications of television exposure and abstract liberalism in influencing minority group incorporation, acceptance, and societal integration

Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man/Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms

Article Submission (Accepted with Revisions): Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man/Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms Article Abstract: In documenting anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, critic Sally L. Kitch argues that they were not only directed against mixed heritage African Americans but also against Asians after the Civil War. Kitch writes, Fourteen states, including many that entered the Union after the war, adopted or revised anti-miscegenation statutes to apply to Mongolians, or Malays in general or to the Chinese in particular. Gender was also paramount to western lawmakers as they determined that the blacks white women were most likely to marry were Chinese men.[1] Other anti-miscegenation statutes were directed specifically against Asian women. Assuming all Chinese women to be prostitutes, the 1875 Page Law drastically diminished the immigration of Chinese women to the United States.[2] Anti-Asian sentiment and the fears of Asian-white miscegenation have also historically been represented in film and literature through the stereotypical figurations of Asians as alien outsiders. Critic Karen Shimakawa cites these stereotypes: Writing about filmic representations of Asian women in her essay Lotus Blossom Dont Bleed, Renée Tajima notes that there are two basic types: the Lotus Blossom Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian Beauty), and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manchus various female relations, prostitutes, devious madams) (309). As for Asian men, Tajima notes, quite often they are cast as rapists or love-struck losers (312).[3] All of these stereotypes are manifestations of the longstanding binary image of Asians as the yellow peril and the model minority which continually functions to exclude Asians from white American society.[4] What happens when Asian Americans, specifically mixed heritage Asian Americans, are aware of and perform these stereotypes? By examining the characters of Doc Franklin Hata, his adopted biracial daughter Sunny Hata, Jerry Battle, and his biracial daughter Theresa Battle in Chang-rae Lees A Gesture Life (1999) and Aloft (2004), respectively, I argue that Lees characters performatively complicate and destabilize the gendered binaries of the Lotus Blossom/Dragon Lady and Charlie Chan (love-struck loser)/Fu Manchu (rapist) stereotypes. Single heritage, male figures such as Doc Hata and Jerry Battle also perform and complicate Asian American stereotypes by demonstrating the slippage between the binary of the asexual, submissive Charlie Chan and the lascivious, insidious Fu Manchu figurations. Their imperfect performances of each side of the stereotypical coin, as it were, attempt to resolve the problematic racializations of Asian Americans through the figurative and literal containment of the racial contagionthat is, themselves and their mixed heritage families. Defying patriarchal containment, the mixed heritage women of both novels performatively spread the yellow peril of their Lotus Blossom/Dragon Lady mélange by complexifying the stereotypes and reproducing mixed heritage children. In addition to deconstructing the discursive opposition between the Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady through their sexualities and maternities, they both layer added binaries to each figuration. Theresa clearly exhibits the ways in which the model minority performance of the Lotus Blossom leads easily to that of the cosmopolitan savior. Sunnys feminized yellow peril performance of the Dragon Lady alternates with her role as the victimized tragic half-breed. While the single race characters, Doc Hata and Jerry, likewise disturb the binary stereotypes of Asian men, their menacing mimicry of white culture reinscribes other binaries by relying on the further abjection of their mixed race daughters. Their first-person, knowledge-producing narrations are symptomatic of their discursive power over their daughters.[5] On the other hand, the mixed race female charactersTheresa and Sunnynot only destabilize gendered model minority/yellow peril stereotypes but also demonstrate that their identities are multiple, uncontainable, and not necessarily dependent on the reinscribed binaries of white/Asian and male/female. [1] Kitch, 143-144. [2] Kitch, 196-197. [3] Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002) 16. [4] Shimakawa states, The destabilizing threat posed by this contradiction, in turn, produces spectacularly divergent resultsimages and representations, as well as legal rulings and governmental policies, that vacillate wildly between positioning Asian Americans as foreigners/outsiders/deviants/criminals or as domesticated/invisible/exemplary/honorary whites. Radically unresolvable, the tension generated in that social/historical contradiction results in the production of racial stereotypes of Asian Americans in representation (15). [5] In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), Michel Foucault famously writes, We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (27-28)