After almost five years of research, collecting data and analyzing it, two psychology graduate students found that members of stigmatized groups might employ strategies to cause good first impressions if they believe others have prejudices against them.
Psychology graduate student Becca Neel and post-doctoral research associate at the Global Institute of Sustainability Samantha Neufeld, who graduated from ASU with a doctorate in social psychology last year, published their findings in the Psychological Science journal this month.
Neel said they decided to focus the research on the person who was on the receiving end of prejudice because past data has only studied where prejudices come from and why they exist.
She said the team wanted to know whether members of stigmatized groups think prejudice is emotion- or threat-specific.
“If they think about it as something that’s emotion-specific, then they might do things to strategically … manage other people’s prejudice,” she said.
The research focused on two kinds of prejudice: disgust- and fear-based. For the disgust-based study, they recruited 75 psychology students who identified themselves as overweight and asked them to rank nine different strategies to create good first impressions.
The strategies included smiling, wearing clean clothes, making eye contact, nodding and arriving on time. The No. 1 strategy was wearing clean clothes.
“We wanted to recruit people from stigmatized groups or from non-stigmatized groups and see what they thought was important for making a good first impression,” she said. “When people are in situations where they think they might be stigmatized, is that actually changing their priorities for making a good first impression?”
Neufeld said her past research had focused on emotions while Neel’s focused on prejudice, so they made a good team. She said she was happy to publish the article after the years of work.
“It took us a little while to get there, but I think it’s very interesting research, and I think it opens the door to different kinds of research on this same idea,” she said. “We showed that there’s some innate mechanisms that people seem to do … to counteract prejudice.”
Before the study started, participants indicated whether they thought they were very overweight for their height. The research assistants didn’t know what the study was about until afterward and were only told they would be part of a study about impressions of groups.
“Because the (research assistants) didn’t know what the study was about, they couldn’t influence the results,” Neel said. “We didn’t want (participants) to be coming into the study thinking ‘This is about obesity, (and) this is about how I see myself.’”
After that study, which was done in the Neuberg Laboratory on the Tempe campus, they conducted a second study online where they contrasted overweight men and African-American men. Neel said African-American men are often stereotyped as violent and physically threatening.
This time, the No. 1 strategy for African-American men was smiling, Neel said.
The duo began working on the research in 2008. It took them until the start of last year to complete the data, and they submitted the article last summer.
“What we think is happening is that when people who are members of these different groups are thinking ‘How are people going to be perceiving me in a stigmatizing situation?’ and ‘What strategies are available to me to counteract those emotions?’” she said. “They’ll selectively choose strategies to deal with that.”
Neel has been working on stigma and prejudice research for almost six years. She said the topic is really interesting, because it affects everyone and not a lot is known about it.
The study has collected data only of what people say they would do, but not on the actual interactions, Neel said.
“We’re really just describing what strategies people are using and what are the beliefs that people have,” she said. “We’re not saying that members of stigmatized groups should be using strategies or that it’s up to them to combat prejudice.”
Secondary education senior Greg Turner said he has felt stigmatized in some situations, because he is African-American.
Turner said it did not happen often back home in Illinois, because there is a large African-American and Hispanic population there.
“It’s one of those things that you can’t describe, but you know it when you see it,” he said. “I kind of laugh about it and go on about my life. I only encounter those people for 30 seconds, and I’ve been alive for more than 30 years.”
Turner said he smiles and jokes frequently, so he just acts naturally whenever he encounters someone who might have a prejudice against him and does not employ any particular strategies to cause a good first impression.
“People are going to think what they’re going to think regardless of what you say or do,” he said. “Maybe they’ll think nicely of me, but that don’t mean the next black person that they come across they’re going to like.”
Reach the reporter at dpbaltaz@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @dpalomabp
