Cultural Contact

The Foundation’s Cultural Contact program is concerned with understanding and improving relations between racial and ethnic groups in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and other key institutional settings. Founded in 1992, the program has examined the effectiveness of diversity training and affirmative action in work places and on college campuses. It has also sponsored a series of working groups looking at how the American legal, education, and health care systems are responding to increased ethnic and cultural diversity. The current working groups address two new areas: the interaction between police and minorities, and the cultural frictions between immigrants and local residents in new areas of immigrant settlement.

Research

Racial Bias in Policing

Working Group

The Racial Bias in Policing working group will seek to integrate experimental and survey research with personnel data to shed light on why, how, and when race influences police decisions.

Stereotype and Status

Project Update

Former Visiting Scholar Susan Fiske discusses her book Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us, an insightful examination of why we compare ourselves to those above and below us.

Books

Cultural Divides

Cultural Divides illuminates the beliefs and attitudes that people hold about themselves in relation to others, and how these social thought processes shape the formation of group identity and intergroup antagonism.

Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities

This groundbreaking volume examines how low institutional and cultural expectations of minorities hinder their academic success, how these stereotypes are perpetuated, and the ways that minority students attempt to empower themselves by redefining their identities.

Just Schools

In Just Schools, noted legal scholars, educators, and social scientists examine schools with widely divergent methods of fostering equality in order to explore the possibilities and limits of equal education today.

Across the Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot

Police officers were compared with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) Black and White targets. Both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed. Officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy. [...]

Fair Measures: A Behavioral Realist Revision of 'Affirmative Action'

New facts recently discovered in the mind and behavioral sciences have the potential to transform both lay and expert conceptions of affirmative action. Drawing on recent findings in implicit social cognition (ISC) and applying a legal methodology called behavioral realism, the authors advance four arguments. [...]

Seeing Race and Seeming Racist? Evaluating Strategic Colorblindness in Social Interaction

One strategy practiced by many Whites to regulate the appearance of prejudice during social interaction is to avoid talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference. Four experiments involving a dyadic task investigated antecedents and consequences of this tendency. [...]

How Americans Talk About Family and Same-Sex Marriage

Brian Powell's landmark survey of American opinions on family shows how opponents of gay marriage talk about the subject.

Trayvon Martin and the Decision to Shoot

Florida's 'stand your ground' defense has been heavily criticized after the Trayvon Martin incident. A RSF-funded study shows how civilians make shooting decisions differently than police officers.

Cultural Contact Experts

Joshua Aronson
New York University

Stereotypes; motivation; race and gender gaps in educational achievement; psychology of stigma; stereotype threat

Frank Dobbin
Harvard University

Diversity management; economic sociology; organizations

Susan T. Fiske
Princeton University

Stereotypes; emotional prejudices (pity, contempt, envy, and pride); discrimination; social psychology

Phillip Atiba Goff
University of California, Los Angeles

Racial bias in policing; mental representations of stigmatized groups; policing and criminal justice

Bonita London
Stony Brook University

Stereotypes, social identity threat, sexism, diversity in higher education, gender and race disparities in academic engagement, stress and coping, experience sampling (diary) research

Samuel Sommers
Tufts University

Stereotyping; prejudice; group diversity; race and social perception, judgment, and interaction; intersection of psychology and law

Featured Research Project

Measuring Upward Economic Mobility

Research Initiative:

Social Inequality

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Russell Sage Foundation offers awards, grants, and positions in our Visiting Scholars program for research that falls under our areas of interest. Learn More