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The Ever-Expanding Definition of “Diversity”

Diversity has become a goal for all sorts of institutions—but what it means may depend on who you ask. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people’s ideologies help determine what they count as “diverse.” Miguel Unzueta, the study’s lead author, notes that “diversity” historically meant inclusiveness toward historically disadvantaged groups. Now, however, the term is commonly used to refer to people who are different in any way (even personality traits and food preferences)—and that, Dr. Unzueta argues, may be making the concept useless. Dr. Unzueta saw this play out first hand at the universities he was part of and the organizations he studied. “It seemed like everyone was very comfortable talking about diversity, but not really race and gender,” says Unzueta, of the Anderson School of Management and University of California, Los Angeles, who co-wrote the paper with Eric Knowles of the University of California, Irvine, and Geoffrey Ho of UCLA. “The problem is, we could all be talking about diversity and we could all mean different things. It's a very abstract, euphemistic catch-all.” ... More>

Majority Groups Support Assimilation—Except When They’re Not Majorities

We generally think that views about how to integrate a diverse society depend on people’s positions in that society—that is, whether they’re in the racial, religious, or cultural majority or a member of a minority. In the U.S., “people tend to believe that blacks prefer pluralism and whites prefer assimilation,” says University of Delaware psychologist Eric Hehman. Assimilation asks minorities—whether newly arrived or historically rooted—to drop their cultural identities and adopt the ways of the majority. Pluralism recognizes and even celebrates minority cultures, which live cooperatively within the majority culture. Now a study by Hehman—along with University of Delaware colleagues Samuel L. Gaertner and David C. Wilson; John F. Dovidio of Yale University; Eric W. Mania of Quinsigamond Community College; Rita Guerra of Lisbon University Institute; and Brian M. Friel of Delaware State University—suggests that our views are more fluid and contextual than that. “The role the group occupies in a particular environment influences its preferences,” says Hehman. The study appears in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.... More>

Observer Article

Research Stands Trial

The Supreme Court recently ruled, by a 5-4 majority, that racial diversity is indeed a compelling interest of higher education. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor supported this conclusion, stating in her ... More>

Cover Story

U Mich Affirmative Action: A Case for Psychological Science

It was not quite the equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, when evolutionary science was itself in the dock, but psychological science’s credentials were in a sense on ... More>