Conservative opponents of DEI may not be as colorblind as they claim
Quote: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.
We then added symbolic racism to our statistical model. Once we did that, our measure of conservatism no longer predicted job interest or perceived fairness in the pro-DEI company condition.
In other words, symbolic racism accounted for the effect of conservatism on outcomes in the DEI condition. This suggests that conservative participants’ reactions to DEI aren’t independent from symbolic racism.
We expanded on these findings in our following studies. In the second study, participants were randomly assigned to read descriptions of similar pro-DEI or pro-teamwork companies. Additionally, half of the participants were told why the organization supported either DEI or teamwork, and the other half were not.
We found that participants who scored higher on conservatism expressed less interest in applying for a job at the pro-DEI company and viewed it as being less fair, regardless of whether DEI – or teamwork – was clearly tied to job-related criteria.
We estimated statistical models similar to the ones we built in the first study. And we again found that when we added symbolic racism to our statistical model, negative views of the DEI company disappeared. Thus, negative reactions to the pro-DEI organization seemed to reflect race-related rather than job-related concerns.
In the third study, participants read job advertisements for a pro-DEI, pro-teamwork or pro-family-values company. The pro-family-values company was described as seeking to preserve traditional values.
We found that participants who more strongly endorsed conservatism were more interested in applying for a job at that company, and viewed it as more fair and a better “fit” in the pro-family-values scenario. The opposite was true of reactions to the pro-DEI company.
When we added symbolic racism to our models, we found that positive views of the pro-family-values company remained significant, but negative views of the pro-DEI company disappeared. This suggests that opposition to DEI is rooted in anti-Black racism, not concerns about politics.