Race and reactions to women's expressions of anger at work: Examining the effects of the "angry Black woman" stereotype

Motro, D., Evans, J. B., Ellis, A., & Benson, L. 

(2022). The Journal of applied psychology, 

107(1), 142–152.

https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000884

Abstract

Across two studies (n = 555), we examine the detrimental effects of the "angry black woman" stereotype in the workplace. Drawing on parallel-constraint-satisfaction theory, we argue that observers will be particularly sensitive to expressions of anger by black women due to widely held stereotypes. In Study 1, we examine a three-way interaction among anger, race, and gender, and find that observers are more likely to make internal attributions for expressions of anger when an individual is a black woman, which then leads to worse performance evaluations and assessments of leadership capability. In Study 2, we focus solely on women and expand our initial model by examining stereotype activation as a mechanism linking the effects of anger and race on internal attributions. We replicated findings from Study 1 and found support for stereotype activation as an underlying mechanism. We believe our work contributes to research on race, gender, and leadership, and highlights an overlooked stereotype in the management literature. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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Conclusion 

Black employees have to overcome a myriad of hurdles at work based on the color of their skin. For black women, our research indicates that there may be additional considerations when identifying biases at work. Anger is an emotion that employees may display in a variety of contexts, often stemming from a

perceived injustice. Bolstered by cultural reinforcement, our studies suggest that the angry black woman stereotype can affect how individuals view displays of anger at work. The angry black woman stereotype represents another hurdle for black women, and we urge future research to expand upon our understanding of the effects of perceptions on black women at work.

The research is here.

Power Causes Brain Damage

Jerry Useem
The Atlantic
Originally published July 2017

Here is an excerpt:

This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?

The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.

Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”

The article is here.

Lack of Intellectual Humility Plagues Our Times, Say Researchers

Paul Ratner
BigThink.com
Originally posted November 12, 2017

Researchers from Duke University say that intellectual humility is an important personality trait that has become in short supply in our country.

Intellectual humility is like open-mindedness. It is basically an awareness that your beliefs may be wrong, influencing a person’s ability to make decisions in politics, health and other areas of life. An intellectually humble person can have strong opinions, say the authors, but will still recognize they are not perfect and are willing to be proven wrong.

This trait is not linked to a specific partisan view, with researchers finding no difference in levels of the characteristic between conservatives, liberals, religious or non-religious people. In fact, the scientists possibly managed to put to rest an age-old stereotype, explained the study’s lead author Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.

The article is here.

Cultivating Humility and Diagnostic Openness in Clinical Judgment

John R. Stone
AMA Journal of Ethics. October 2017, Volume 19, Number 10: 970-977.

Abstract
In this case, a physician rejects a patient’s concerns that tainted water is harming the patient and her community. Stereotypes and biases regarding socioeconomic class and race/ethnicity, constraining diagnostic frameworks, and fixed first impressions could skew the physician’s judgment. This paper narratively illustrates how cultivating humility could help the physician truly hear the patient’s suggestions. The discussion builds on the multifaceted concept of cultural humility as a lifelong journey that addresses not only stereotypes and biases but also power inequalities and community inequities. Insurgent multiculturalism is a complementary concept. Through epistemic humility—which includes both intellectual and emotional components—and admitting uncertainty, physicians can enhance patients’ and families’ epistemic authority and health agency.

The article is here.

Fat Shaming in the Doctor's Office Can Be Mentally and Physically Harmful

American Psychological Association
Press Release from August 3, 2017

Medical discrimination based on people’s size and negative stereotypes of overweight people can take a toll on people’s physical health and well-being, according to a review of recent research presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

“Disrespectful treatment and medical fat shaming, in an attempt to motivate people to change their behavior, is stressful and can cause patients to delay health care seeking or avoid interacting with providers,” presenter Joan Chrisler, PhD, a professor of psychology at Connecticut College, said during a symposium titled “Weapons of Mass Distraction — Confronting Sizeism.”

Sizeism can also have an effect on how doctors medically treat patients, as overweight people are often excluded from medical research based on assumptions about their health status, Chrisler said, meaning the standard dosage for drugs may not be appropriate for larger body sizes. Recent studies have shown frequent under-dosing of overweight patients who were prescribed antibiotics and chemotherapy, she added.

“Recommending different treatments for patients with the same condition based on their weight is unethical and a form of malpractice,” Chrisler said. “Research has shown that doctors repeatedly advise weight loss for fat patients while recommending CAT scans, blood work or physical therapy for other, average weight patients.”

In some cases, providers might not take fat patients’ complaints seriously or might assume that their weight is the cause of any symptoms they experience, Chrisler added. “Thus, they could jump to conclusions or fail to run appropriate tests, which results in misdiagnosis,” she said.

The pressor is here.

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Harvard Business Review
Originally published August 22, 2013

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

The article is here.

The Moral Failure of Crowdfunding Health Care

Jonathan Hiskes
medium.com
Originally posted April 3, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The most dangerous consequence of the rise of medical crowdfunding, they argue, is the way it trains us to see health care as a personal good to be earned, rather than a universal human right. Other forums, like a public town hall, could provide room for debate on whether we want this state of affairs in our country. The format of GoFundMe steers users toward “hyper-individualized accounts of suffering.”

“Relying on these sites changes how we perceive the problem,” said Kenworthy. “It masks a more open conversation we could be having about the inequities of our health system. There’s no space for a structural critique in your personal appeal.”

In this way, crowdfunding functions as both a symptom and a cause of a health care system designed for austerity.

The article is here.

Human brain is predisposed to negative stereotypes, new study suggests

Hannah Devlin
The Guardian
Originally posted November 1, 2016

The human brain is predisposed to learn negative stereotypes, according to research that offers clues as to how prejudice emerges and spreads through society.

The study found that the brain responds more strongly to information about groups who are portrayed unfavourably, adding weight to the view that the negative depiction of ethnic or religious minorities in the media can fuel racial bias.

Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London, who led the research, said: “The newspapers are filled with ghastly things people do ... You’re getting all these news stories and the negative ones stand out. When you look at Islam, for example, there’s so many more negative stories than positive ones and that will build up over time.”

The article is here.

Truth in stereotypes

Lee Jussim

Aeon Magazine

Originally published August 15, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

These practices created what I call ‘The Myth of Stereotype Inaccuracy’. Famous psychologists declaring stereotypes inaccurate without a citation or evidence meant that anyone could do likewise, creating an illusion that pervasive stereotype inaccuracy was ‘settled science’. Subsequent researchers could declare stereotypes inaccurate and could create the appearance of scientific support by citing articles that also made the claim. Only if one looked for the empirical research underlying such claims did one discover that there was nothing there; just a black hole.

‘But wait!’ you say. ‘Researchers are often defining stereotypes as inaccurate, not declaring them to be empirically inaccurate, and they can define their terms how they choose.’ To which I reply: ‘Are you sure that is the argument you are going to use to defend the viability of “stereotypes are inaccurate”?’

The article is here.

Stereotype Threat, Epistemic Injustice, and Rationality

Stacey Goguen
Draft, forthcoming (2016) in Brownstein and Saul (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Vol I,
Oxford University Press.

Stereotype threat is most well-known for its ability to hinder performance. However, it actually has a  wide range of effects. For instance, it can also cause stress, anxiety, and self-doubt. These additional effects are as important and as central to the phenomenon as its effects on performance are. As a result, stereotype threat has more far-reaching implications than many philosophers have realized. In particular, the phenomenon has a number of unexplored “epistemic effects.

These are effects on our epistemic lives — i.e., the ways we engage with the world as actual and potential knowers. In this paper I flesh out the implications of a specific epistemic effect: self-doubt. Certain kinds of self-doubt can deeply affect our epistemic lives by exacerbating moments of epistemic injustice and by perniciously interacting with ideals of rationality. In both cases, self-doubt can lead to one questioning one’s own humanity or full personhood. Because stereotype threat can trigger this kind of self-doubt, it can affect various aspects of ourselves besides our ability to perform to our potential. It can also affect our very sense of self. In this paper, I argue that we should adopt a more comprehensive account of stereotype threat that explicitly acknowledges all of the known effects of the phenomenon. Doing so will allow us to better investigate the epistemological implications of stereotype threat, as well as the full extent of its reach into our lives. I focus on fleshing out stereotype threat’s effect of self-doubt, and how this effect can influence the very foundations of our epistemic lives. I do this by arguing that self-doubt from stereotype threat can constitute an epistemic injustice, and that this sort of self-doubt can be exacerbated by stereotypes of irrationality. As a result, self-doubt from stereotype threat can erode our faith in ourselves as full human persons and as rational, reliable knowers.

The full text is here.

Bias, Black Lives, and Academic Medicine

By David A. Ansell and Edwin K. McDonald
The New England Journal of Medicine
Originally published February 18, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

First, there is evidence that doctors hold stereotypes based on patients' race that can influence their clinical decisions.  Implicit bias refers to unconscious racial stereotypes that grow from our personal and cultural experiences. These implicit beliefs may also stem from a lack of day-to-day interracial and intercultural interactions. Although explicit race bias is rare among physicians, an unconscious preference for whites as compared with blacks is commonly revealed on tests of implicit bias.

Second, despite physicians' and medical centers' best intentions of being equitable, black–white disparities persist in patient outcomes, medical education, and faculty recruitment.

The entire article is here.

When Talking About Bias Backfires

By Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg
The New York Times - Sunday Review
Originally published December 6, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Rather than merely informing managers that stereotypes persisted, they added that a “vast majority of people try to overcome their stereotypic preconceptions.” With this adjustment, discrimination vanished in their studies. After reading this message, managers were 28 percent more interested in working with the female candidate who negotiated assertively and judged her as 25 percent more likable.

When we communicate that a vast majority of people hold some biases, we need to make sure that we’re not legitimating prejudice. By reinforcing the idea that people want to conquer their biases and that there are benefits to doing so, we send a more effective message: Most people don’t want to discriminate, and you shouldn’t either.

The entire article is here.

Editor's note: Read the entire article and reflect on how this can influence the way in which psychologists communicate with patients.

Preventing Weight Bias: A Toolkit for Professionals in Clinical Practice

Yale Rudd Center
Resource for Clinicians

Weight bias jeopardizes patients' emotional and physical health. As the majority of Americans are now overweight or obese, this is an important clinical concern, one that no provider can afford to ignore.

This toolkit is designed to help clinicians across a variety of practice settings with easy-to-implement solutions and resources to improve delivery of care for overweight and obese patients. The resources are designed for busy professionals and customized for various practice settings. They range from simple strategies to improve provider-patient communication and ways to make positive changes in the office environment , to profound ones, including self-examination of personal biases.

The entire 8 Module Toolkit is here.