But our recent research, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, suggests that conservative critiques of DEI often boil down to one thing: anti-Black racism.
As psychology researchers, we wanted to understand why people react to DEI the way they do. So, we recruited more than 1,000 people to take part in three related studies.
For each study, we measured participants’ conservatism on a seven-point scale ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Single-item measures such as this are often used by researchers.
We also measured participants’ anti-Black racism using the symbolic racism scale, which is a well-validated and commonly used measure of anti-Black racism. Research suggests that as overt racism has become less acceptable, people tend to direct racism toward symbols of racial equality, like DEI. That meant the symbolic racism scale was an ideal measure of anti-Black racism for our purposes.
How we did our work
In the first study, we asked participants to read a job advertisement from either a company that emphasizes DEI or a company that emphasized teamwork and good professional relationships. Then, participants rated their interest in the job and how fair they thought the company was. In later studies, they also indicated how well they thought they’d fit in.
We found that participants who scored higher on our measure of conservatism expressed significantly less interest in pursuing a job at the company promoting DEI, and viewed it as less fair compared with the company promoting teamwork.
