To Look or Not to Look: Acknowledging Facial Stigmas in the Interview to Reduce Discrimination

As the use of technology-mediated interviews (e.g., Skype) is becoming a standard method to interview applicants, it is important to understand how discrimination can still manifest in these types of interviews. Because technology-mediated interviews focus on applicants’ faces, discrimination based on facial stigmas can be particularly inevitable. Thus, the purpose of the current study is to examine how a facial stigma affects visual attention during a technology-mediated interview and acknowledgment as a remediation strategy that individuals might use to reduce the amount of visual attention on a facial stigma. We used a 2 (acknowledge: yes or no) x 2 (target gender: male or female) experimental design. The participants heard a computer-mediated interview while viewing one of the manipulated images. For half of the conditions, the participants heard the applicant acknowledge their stigma. Using an eye tracker, visual attention to the stigma was measured every 30 seconds during the 8-minute interview, producing 16 different time points and a total of 1,792 data points. Multilevel growth curve model analysis examined variation in the trajectory of visual attention to the stigma. The results showed that facial stigmas draw visual attention during a computer-mediated interview, which decreased over time. However, the trajectory of the decrease in visual attention depended on whether an applicant acknowledged their stigma during the interview. The decrease in visual attention was faster in the acknowledgment condition than in the control condition. The current research provides a better understanding to how a facial stigma influences the interview process and provides a theoretical rationale for why acknowledging a facial stigma benefits the interview process

The Impact of Suspect Descriptions in University Crime Reports on Racial Bias

Crime reports often include suspect descriptions to alert community members and aid in police investigations. However, vague descriptions of suspects with racial identifiers can potentially do more harm than good. We first conducted an archival study to examine the frequency of reporting suspect race, as well as the relationship between the inclusion of race and the likelihood that the suspect was caught. Then we conducted an experimental study to examine how reporting race may affect overt and subtle racial attitudes. We found no significant relationship between the racial identification of a suspect and the likelihood that the suspect was caught in our archival study. However, our findings from the experimental study demonstrate increased overt and subtle racial bias towards Black people when comparing participants who read a crime report with a Black suspect to those who read one about a suspect with no racial identification. Implications and future directions are discussed

An Introduction to Psychological Statistics

This work has been superseded by Introduction to Statistics in the Psychological Sciences available from https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/25/. - We are constantly bombarded by information, and finding a way to filter that information in an objective way is crucial to surviving this onslaught with your sanity intact. This is what statistics, and logic we use in it, enables us to do. Through the lens of statistics, we learn to find the signal hidden in the noise when it is there and to know when an apparent trend or pattern is really just randomness. The study of statistics involves math and relies upon calculations of numbers. But it also relies heavily on how the numbers are chosen and how the statistics are interpreted. This work was created as part of the University of Missouri’s Affordable and Open Access Educational Resources Initiative (https://www.umsystem.edu/ums/aa/oer). The contents of this work have been adapted from the following Open Access Resources: Online Statistics Education: A Multimedia Course of Study (http://onlinestatbook.com/). Project Leader: David M. Lane, Rice University. Changes to the original works were made by Dr. Garett C. Foster in the Department of Psychological Sciences to tailor the text to fit the needs of the introductory statistics course for psychology majors at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Materials from the original sources have been combined, reorganized, and added to by the current author, and any conceptual, mathematical, or typographical errors are the responsibility of the current author

A Call to Action: Taking the Untenable out of Women Professors’ Pregnancy, Postpartum, and Caregiving Demands

Despite becoming increasingly represented in academic departments, women scholars face a critical lack of support as they navigate demands pertaining to pregnancy, motherhood, and child caregiving. In addition, cultural norms surrounding how faculty and academic leaders discuss and talk about tenure, promotion, and career success have created pressure for women who wish to grow their family and care for their children, leading to questions about whether it is possible for these women to have a family and an academic career. The current paper is a call to action for academia to build structures that support women professors as they navigate the complexities of pregnancy, the postpartum period, and the caregiving demands of their children. We specifically call on those of us in I-O psychology, management, and related departments to lead the way. In making this call, we first present the realistic, moral, and financial cases for why this issue needs to be at the forefront of discussions surrounding success in the academy. We then discuss how in the U.S. and elsewhere, an absence of policies supporting women places two groups of academics—department heads (as the leaders of departments who have discretion outside of formal policies to make work better for women) and other faculty members (as potential allies both in the department and within our professional organizations)—in a critical position to enact support and change. We conclude with our boldest call—to make a cultural shift that shatters the assumption that having a family is not compatible with academic success. Combined, we seek to launch a discussion that leads directly to necessary and overdue changes in how women scholars are supported in academia

The Future of Women in Psychological Science.

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science