The GGSC's Bridging Differences initiative aims to help address the urgent issue of political and cultural polarization.ĭo you work to help people or groups bridge their differences, whether as a mediator, organization leader, educator, politician, workplace manager, or otherwise? Fill out this short survey and let us know how we can help.Ĭooley’s finding suggests that lessons about white privilege could persuade social liberals to place greater personal blame on poor white people for their social circumstances, out of the belief that their “privilege” outweighs other social factors that could have brought them to their station in life. it didn’t significantly change how they empathized with a poor black person-but it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a poor white person,” she says. ![]() “Instead, what we found is that when liberals read about white privilege. Cooley had wondered if teaching a liberal person about white privilege would increase their sympathy for a poor black person who doesn’t benefit from it. How sympathetic did the people feel toward white Kevin vs. However, they told one group that Kevin was a white man, while others heard he was black. Kevin was described as being raised by a single mother, a welfare recipient, and someone who had been in jail. (A control group did not get the white privilege lesson.) In the second part, participants were told about a hypothetical man named Kevin who was down on his luck in New York City. In the first part of the experiment, they gave participants a short reading about how white people have more social power than other racial groups in America. Then they conducted a two-part experiment. They also created an economic liberalism scale-based on viewpoints on issues like government spending and taxation-for the same respondents. In their study, the researchers had respondents grade themselves on a scale of social liberalism along a number of issues, such as abortion, gun safety, and gay rights. We had a lot of complicated conversations early on about what it means to be white, especially a white man who’s poor.” Over time, she realized that she wasn’t thinking enough about divisions among white people. “And I’m about to marry a white man who grew up poor. “I’m a professor who studies racism,” she says. ![]() The flip side of people associating black people with poverty, she says, would be to associate wealth with being white, and she wanted to study what that looked like-in part because of conversations she had with her fiancé. “So, this means when people have negative attitudes toward black people, because they’re imagining that black people are benefiting from wealth redistribution, they’re less likely to support wealth redistribution.” “When people imagine welfare recipients, they think to imagine black people,” she says. They also found that this association predicted opposition toward welfare and redistributive economic policies-fed by the belief that these policies would necessarily benefit blacks over whites. In another study published this year, Cooley and colleagues found participants were more likely to associate poverty with blacks as opposed to whites. ![]() ![]() As a long-time researcher of prejudice and its impact on the way we think, Cooley was drawn to study the topic by related research she conducted on how Americans associate race with wealth. Colgate University social psychologist Erin Cooley is one of the lead authors of the study.
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