On the Perils of Misplaced Assumptions: Appreciating the Need for Diversity Science

The ability to support, or refute lay intuition regarding human nature is one of the calling cards of psychological—and, in particular, social psychological—research. As Victoria Plaut’s (this issue) target article demonstrates, diversity is a topic about which many such lay assumptions are problematic, if not wholly misplaced. The need for a diversity science becomes all the more pressing in light of this frequent divergence between how people typically think about diversity-related issues and how cognition and behavior actually play out in diverse contexts. In this commentary, we focus on four such questionable assumptions and their implications for theory and practice.