Digital Library
Instructing Animosity How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias
Topic:
Antisemitism & Antizionism, Israel & Regional Politics
Principal Investigators:
Joel Finkelstein
Study Date:
2024
Source:
Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI),Rutgers University Social Perception Lab
Key Findings:
The evidence presented in these studies reveals that while purporting to combat bias, some anti-oppressive DEI narratives can engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment. Although not addressed in the studies reported herein, it is also possible that these factors are mutually reinforcing and spread through social contagion.
The findings raise this possibility which the researchers offer here in the form of a post-hoc process model (to be investigated in future studies):
(1) Anti-Oppressive Intervention: DEI training rooted in anti-oppressive rhetoric introduces narratives that lead people to assume that certain groups are inherent oppressors and others as inherent victims.
(2) Increased Racial Suspicion: Exposure leads to hostile attribution bias, causing participants to see discrimination when there is no evidence that discrimination has occurred, driving racial prejudice, intergroup hostility, suspicion and division.
(3) Authoritarian Policing: This heightened suspicion triggers authoritarian policing tendencies, leading people to endorse surveillance and purity testing, strict social controls, and escalating responses from corrective to coercive.
(4) Punitive Retribution: Participants show greater support for extreme punitive measures against perceived oppressors as well as those seen as ideologically impure.
(5) Calls for More Interventions: The heightened punitive atmosphere feeds back into demands for more anti-oppressive DEI training, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of suspicion and intolerance.
Taken in its entirety, this research demonstrates a pressing need for data-driven pressure testing of DEI interventions to examine potential harms. In spite of the serious consequences we outline above, DEI offerings have no independent, scientific review board for objective evaluation and no standards of transparency for the materials themselves. Offerings at major corporations for example, were nearly impossible to collect because these materials are not publicly available, and thus the full implications and spread of potentially harmful content is currently impossible to examine.
This research raises critical questions about how many individuals, as a result of these programs, have experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment. The hostile attribution bias revealed in NCRI’s study appears readily transmissible by the DEI pedagogy above, much of which is inserted into recommended or mandatory readings and trainings that are widely adopted at present. This suggests the potential for a far broader scope of harm than previously considered, underscoring the urgency of rigorous evaluation of anti-oppressive, DEI interventions to identify unintended and damaging consequences, and, ultimately, to prevent them.
Methodology:
Across three groupings—race, religion, and caste—NCRI collected anti-oppressive DEI educational materials frequently used in interventional and educational settings.
The religion-focused interventions drew on content from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), commonly used in sensitivity training on Islamophobia. For race, materials featured excerpts from DEI scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Caste interventions featured anti-oppression narratives from Equality Labs, one of the most prolific training providers for caste discrimination in North America.
Rhetoric from these materials was excerpted and administered in psychological surveys measuring explicit bias, social distancing, demonization, and authoritarian tendencies. Participants were randomly assigned to review these materials or neutral control material. Their responses to this material was assessed through various questions assessing intergroup hostility and authoritarianism, and through scenario-based questions (details on all demographic data, survey questions, essay conditions, responses and analyses can be found in a supplementary document to this report).
It is beyond the scope of this research to evaluate DEI training writ large and this work therefore, should not be taken as evaluating the efficacy of an entire industry. There are numerous diversity trainings that do not subscribe to anti-oppressive frames, some of which may be successful or, at the least, harmless.