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1. Influence of Workplace Microaggressions on Engineering Female Faculty Motivation to do Research

   https://doi.org/10.34190/icgr.6.1.1131  

   Mardani, Mojdeh; Stupnisky, Robert (April 2023, International Conference on Gender Research)

   Negative and often unconscious beliefs about marginalised groups, including women and people of colour, sometimes manifest in discriminatory and degrading slights called microaggressions. Since most often microaggressions are in the form of subtle actions, unobtrusive comments, or humorous gestures, they are frequently overlooked as innocent and harmless, specifically to bystanders. However, their adverse effects on those on the receiving end are anything but innocuous, even if perpetrators are utterly unaware of their harmful comments or behaviours. Minorities and marginalized individuals often find microaggressions more harmful than blatant racism and discrimination. Six hundred and eleven STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) faculty from ten USA universities completed an online survey in the spring of 2021, of which 39% self-identified as Underrepresented Minority, URM, faculty. This study revealed that on average, URM women were 50% more susceptible to gender microaggressions, which correlated negatively with autonomy (having choice) and competence (being capable and effective), and positively with amotivation (lack of motivation). Case in point, 38% of them believed their opinions were overlooked in a group discussion because of their gender. Women with intersecting identities, such as women of colour, experienced both forms of gender and racial/ethnic microaggressions. They have experienced being ignored at work, being treated differently, and their opinion being overlooked based on their gender and/or their race/ethnicity. While detecting bias and microaggression and acknowledging their occurrence is crucial, taking deliberate and precise actions to disrupt and prevent them from re-occurring is even more pivotal. By realising the prevalence of discrimination and microaggressions towards underrepresented minority female faculty, and sharing insights into the complex and overarching race, ethnic, and gender relations among other social constructs, this study deepens our understanding of the challenges and barriers that this group has to grapple with. By adopting and creating effective institutional policies and professional training in support of diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency we can improve the experiences of URM faculty and positively impact their motivation and productivity. 

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2. Effectively Learning from Pedagogical Demonstrations

   Ho, Mark K; Littman, Michael L.; Cushman, Fiery; Austerweil, Joseph L. (January 2018, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   When observing others’ behavior, people use Theory of Mind to infer unobservable beliefs, desires, and intentions. And when showing what activity one is doing, people will modify their behavior in order to facilitate more accurate interpretation and learning by an observer. Here, we present a novel model of how demonstrators act and observers interpret demonstrations corresponding to different levels of recursive social reasoning (i.e. a cognitive hierarchy) grounded in Theory of Mind. Our model can explain how demonstrators show others how to perform a task and makes predictions about how sophisticated observers can reason about communicative intentions. Additionally, we report an experiment that tests (1) how well an observer can learn from demonstrations that were produced with the intent to communicate, and (2) how an observer’s interpretation of demonstrations influences their judgments. 

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3. Race-Based Biases in Judgments of Social Pain

   Jason C. Deska, Jonathan Kunstman (May 2020, Journal of experimental social psychology)

   Six studies tested the hypothesis that evaluators judge Black people less sensitive to social pain than White people. Social pain was operationalized as the psychological distress caused by experiences that damage social worth and interpersonal relationships (e.g., derogation, exclusion, unfairness). White evaluators judged both Black male (Studies 1, 2a, & 2b) and female (Studies 2a & 2b) targets as experiencing less social pain than White male and female targets. Study 3 provided evidence that this bias also extends to Black evaluators. Further, the belief that Black people are less sensitive to social pain than White people was mediated by judgments of differential life hardship experienced by Black and White targets (Study 4) and did not seem to be a subset of a broader tendency to judge Black targets as generally insensate (Study 5). Critically, the observed race-based social pain bias also translated into beliefs that Black targets needed fewer supportive resources than White targets to cope with socially painful events (Study 6). The current research demonstrates that there are racial biases in judgments of others’ psychological distress and these biases inform social support judgments for those in need. 

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4. Poster Session I: Criterion effects in maximum likelihood difference scaling: Similar is not always the opposite of different

   https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.15.46  

   Shi, Yangyi; Eskew, Rhea (December 2023, Journal of Vision)

   Maximum Likelihood Difference Scaling (MLDS) is an efficient method of estimating perceptual representations of suprathreshold physical quantities (Maloney & Yang, 2003), such as luminance contrast. In MLDS, observers can be instructed to judge which of two stimulus pairs are more similar to one another, or which of the two pairs are more different from one another. If the same physical attributes are used for both the similar and dissimilar tasks, the two criteria should produce the same perceptual scales. We estimated perceptual scales for suprathreshold achromatic square patches. Increments and decrements on the mid-gray background were estimated separately. Observers judged which pair of stimuli were more similar in half of the sessions, and more different in the other half sessions. For most observers, the two tasks produced the same perceptual scales: a decelerating curve for increment contrasts and a cubic curve for decremental contrasts (cf. Whittle, 1992). These scales predicted forced-choice contrast discrimination thresholds for both increments and decrements. However, for a subset of observers, the ‘more different’ judgments produced scales that accelerated with contrast for both increments and decrements; these scale shapes do not predict their discrimination thresholds. Our results suggest that, even with these simple stimuli, observers in an MLDS experiment may attend to different aspects of the stimulus depending on the assigned task. 

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5. Facial Stereotyping Drives Judgments of Perceptually Ambiguous Social Groups

   https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211062285  

   Bin_Meshar, Maryam; Stolier, Ryan_M; Freeman, Jonathan_B (December 2021, Social Psychological and Personality Science)

   When seeing a face, people form judgments of perceptually ambiguous social categories (PASCs), for example, gun-owners, gay people, or alcoholics. Previous research has assumed that PASC judgments arise from the statistical learning of facial features in social encounters. We propose, instead, that perceivers associate facial features with traits (e.g., extroverted) and then infer PASC membership via learned stereotype associations with those traits. Across three studies, we show that when any PASC is more stereotypically associated with a trait (e.g., alcoholics = extroverted), perceivers are more likely to infer PASC membership from faces conveying that trait (Study 1). Furthermore, we demonstrate that individual differences in trait–PASC stereotypes predict face-based judgments of PASC membership (Study 2) and have a causal role in these judgments (Study 3). Together, our findings imply that people can form any number of PASC judgments from facial appearance alone by drawing on their learned social–conceptual associations. 

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