Biomedical subjects

Faye J Crosby

Publications and source records attributed to Faye J Crosby.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Understanding affirmative action.

Affirmative action is a controversial and often poorly understood policy. It is also a policy that has been widely studied by social scientists. In this review, we outline how affirmative action operates in employment and education settings and consider the major points of controversy. In addition, we detail the contributions of psychologists and other social scientists in helping to demonstrate why affirmative action is needed; how it can have unintended negative consequences; and how affirmative action programs can be most successful. We also review how psychologists have examined variations in people's attitudes toward affirmative action, in part as a means for testing different theories of social behavior.

Humans↗

PubMed2003

Affirmative action. Psychological data and the policy debates.

The authors bring psychological research to bear on an examination of the policy of affirmative action. They argue that data from many studies reveal that affirmative action as a policy has more benefits than costs. Although the majority of pro-affirmative action arguments in the social sciences stress diversity, the authors' argument focuses on issues of merit. The merit-based argument, grounded in empirical studies, concludes that the policy of affirmative action conforms to the American ideal of fairness and is a necessary policy.

Civil Rights↗

PubMed2003

White guilt and racial compensation: the benefits and limits of self-focus.

In two studies, the authors investigated guilt as a response to group-based advantage. Consistent with its conceptualization as a self-focused emotion, White guilt was based in self-focused beliefs in racial inequality. Thus, guilt was associated with belief in White privilege (Study 1) and resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination (Study 2). Just as personal guilt is associated with efforts at restitution, White guilt was predictive of support for affirmative action programs aimed at compensating African Americans. White guilt was not, however, predictive of support for noncompensatory efforts at promoting equality, such as affirmative action programs that increase opportunities (Study 2). In contrast, the other-focused emotion of group-based sympathy was a more general predictor of support for different affirmative action policies. Our findings demonstrate the benefits and limits of group-based guilt as a basis of support for social equality and highlight the value of understanding the specific emotions elicited in intergroup contexts.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Trends in the social psychological study of justice.

Justice is one of the most basic and potentially important social psychological areas of inquiry. The assumption that others will be fair is what makes social cooperation possible. This article provides a brief review of trends, both historical and current, in the social psychological study of justice, and provides an introduction for a special issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review devoted to social psychological theorizing and research on the role that justice plays in human affairs. This overview highlights some exciting new directions in justice theorizing and research, including new uses of identity's ties to justice reasoning, increased attention to negative justice and moral emotion, as well as a greater emphasis on integrative and contingent, rather than competing, social psychological models of justice.

Humans↗

PubMed2003

Connections between the ivory tower and the multicolored world: linking abstract theories of social justice to the rough and tumble of affirmative action.

This article seeks to combine the social psychologist's interest in articulating and testing concepts with the public policymaker's interest in the effective implementation of specific policies and programs. The first part of the article applies knowledge about distributive and procedural justice to understanding some of the opposition to affirmative action. The application also reveals some lacunae-specifically concerning rule change-in how social psychologists have looked at procedural justice issues. In the second part of the article, we discuss the problem of rule change and propose a set of conceptualizations about the conditions that govern people's reactions to rule change. We end by reflecting on some changes in our studies of procedural justice.

Humans↗