Abstract
Echoing the 1960s, the 2020s opened with racial tensions boiling. The Black Lives Matter movement is energized, issuing pleas to listen to Black voices regarding day-to-day discrimination and expressing frustrations over the slow progress of social justice. However, psychological scientists have published only several opinion pieces on racial microaggressions, primarily objections, and strikingly little empirical data. Here I document three trends in psychology that coincide with the academic pushback against microaggressions: concept-creep concerns, especially those regarding expanded notions of harm; the expansion of right-leaning values in moral judgments (moral foundations theory); and an emphasis on prejudice symmetry, with the political left deemed equivalently biased against right-leaning targets (e.g., the rich, police) as the right is against left-leaning targets (e.g., Black people, women, LGBT+ people). Psychological scientists have ignored power dynamics and have strayed from their mission to understand and combat prejudice against disadvantaged populations, rendering researchers distracted and ill-equipped to tackle the microaggression concept. An apparent creep paradox, with calls to both reduce (e.g., harm) and expand (e.g., liberal prejudices, conservative moral foundations) concepts, poses a serious challenge to research on prejudice. I discuss the need for psychology to better capture Black experiences and to “tell it like it is” or risk becoming an irrelevant discipline of study.
Just weeks before his assassination in 1968, civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered an address at the American Psychological Association conference (see King, 2018). Against a racially tense backdrop that increasingly mirrors our own, he expressed strong disapproval with the lack of progress psychological scientists were making in the study of race relations. Moreover, he charged that “White America has an appalling lack of knowledge concerning the reality of Negro life” and urged the field to listen to Black voices and then “tell it like it is” (p. 215). This was followed by another poignant observation: The slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt the Negro, but they have also awakened him and revealed the nature of the oppressor. . . . When this process of awareness and independence crystallizes, every rebuke, every evasion, become hammer blows on the wedge that splits the Negro from the larger society. (p. 220)
In this passage, King starkly warned academic psychologists that ignoring Black voices and experiences risked deepening existing racial divides and fueling greater problems. Although the term “microaggression” did not then exist, he might have used it to convey concerns about the day-to-day dismissal and subjugation of disadvantaged groups that the term now captures (see Sue et al., 2007), the steady drip of lower-level rejection that has a cumulative negative effect (but which can be easily ignored or dismissed by the dominant group). Foreshadowing the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 protests against the police killing of George Floyd (among others), King was imploring psychology to do more and to do better.
If he were alive today and able to address our next annual conference, how might King evaluate our field? Pettigrew (2018), an esteemed researcher on prejudice who was present during King’s speech, suggested that we have earned ourselves “at best a mixed response” (p. 377). Indeed, racial tensions and resentments are surging in the United States and elsewhere (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2018). Black protestors in the streets shout “I can’t breathe” and “Say their names” in reaction to being repeatedly silenced and marginalized by society and social institutions. Black people clearly feel unheard. Stewart and Sweetman (2018) argued that after King’s speech our field became distracted by overly emphasizing cognitive and implicit processes among the perpetrators of prejudice, at the cost of intergroup dynamics and context. There is merit to that argument, but here I argue that additional choices have set us off course. Indeed, reading our journals and listening to conference speakers, King would hear prominent academics arguing that our definitions of harm have “crept” and now cover too much, supposedly the result of an overly liberal agenda (Haslam, 2016) and an increasingly liberal professoriate (Haidt & Haslam, 2016). He would also hear that harms expressed by minority groups (e.g., microaggressions) should not be taken seriously because they are merely subjective experiences (Haidt, 2017; Haslam, 2016; see also Lilienfeld, 2017a). In other words, he would hear arguments to shrink our scope of our analysis concerning harm, which in effect turns the lights down on exposing prejudice.
Yet King would simultaneously hear arguments for the expansion of social-value considerations to incorporate a more balanced or comprehensive palette of moral foundations that resonate more with conservatives, such as authority, in-group favoritism, and purity (Graham et al., 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007), many of the very factors repeatedly demonstrated to exacerbate (not counteract) intergroup biases (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Moreover, our esteemed guest would learn that a fulsome story of prejudice speaks to those on the political left being equally biased (against bankers, the police, religious fundamentalists, the rich, etc.) as those on the right (against Black people, women, LGBT+ people, etc.)—that there is supposedly a prejudice symmetry that has been neglected while the field focused too heavily on racism, sexism, and homophobia (Brandt & Crawford, 2020; Brandt et al., 2014). Put simply, he would see a field coalescing around the idea that there is too much expansion (of liberal priorities) yet also too little expansion (of conservative priorities). All of this, of course, was playing against a backdrop of an American president who, after seeing neo-Nazis march openly in Charlottesville shouting “Jews will not replace us,” claimed that there were “some very fine people on both sides” (R. Gray, 2017). He would see protests sparked after a police officer brazenly suffocated an unarmed Black man (George Floyd) with his knee, posing for a camera with hands in his pockets as though over a trophy kill while fellow officers did not intervene (Dakss, 2020). He would see a once-in-a-century pandemic (COVID-19) disproportionately affecting Black people, who are more unemployed, less insured, and often in poorer health than other racial groups (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021). The premise of this article is that the field of psychology is currently ill-equipped to address the issue of microaggressions, in part from a lack of effort and will but also because we have drifted off course regarding the very nature of prejudice itself.
Microaggressions
Although researchers have been studying more subtle and insidious forms of racism for decades, including aversive racism (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004), modern racism (McConahay et al., 1981), and symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981), Sue and colleagues caused a stir with their article entitled “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice” in the American Psychologist (Sue et al., 2007). In short, microaggressions are conceptualized the “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (Sue et al., 2007, p. 271), the “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges, which are ‘put downs’ toward people of color” (Pierce et al., 1978, p. 66). For instance, Sue and colleagues suggested that Asian or Latino Americans are made to feel alien in their own country (“Where are you from?”), that minorities of many types are exposed to myths of meritocracy (“Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough”), and that Black people in particular are pathologized as being too vocal or angry when expressing everyday emotions. At its core is the notion that minorities are subject to microinsults, being recipients of insensitive, demoralizing communications; microassaults, being recipients of violent expressions or purposeful avoidance, and microinvalidations, being ignored, dismissed, or negated. These ideas are rooted in a clinical tradition but are consistent with decades of work in social psychology on nontraditional forms of prejudice (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004; Kinder & Sears, 1981; McConahay et al., 1981) and implicit biases (Greenwald & Banaji, 2017). Although largely developed within the context of race in the United States, the microaggression concept can be applied to other contexts, such as men’s sexism against women (Capodilupo et al., 2010; e.g., being objectified or ignored or targeted in jokes), and at the intersection of race and gender (Lewis & Neville, 2015).
Speaking to King’s larger point, dominant groups (e.g., White people, men) are not in the habit of looking for or recognizing evidence of microaggressions, presumably being happier to shape and define social realities about which actions are offensive or harmful (for a related point, see Sue et al., 2008). One implication is that minorities can be made to feel that they are being gaslit by mainstream society. In its contemporary usage, the term “gaslighting” refers to “manipulat[ing] (someone) by psychological means into doubting their own sanity” (Oxford University Press, n.d.). At the intergroup level, this means that minorities are treated as though their protestations and assertions of persistent bias and discrimination are unreasonable, exaggerated, unfounded, and dismissible (see Williams, 2020b). This harkens back to King’s call to listen to the voices of minorities or risk escalating tensions. Indeed, to advocates of the concept, microaggressions play a central role in day-to-day racism, somewhere between dignity and respect on the one hand and violence and homicide on the other. Consistent with theorizing by Jackman (1994, 2005), power dynamics between racial groups often do not involve direct acts of violence but instead involve lower-level reminders of its potential and the benefits of not protesting. It is at such crossroads—the conceptual and political “gray areas”—that racism and bias can emerge under the cover of less odious attributions for behavior (e.g., Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004; Hodson et al., 2002, 2010). For this reason, microaggressions are well positioned to be fertile ground for empirical study by psychological scientists.
But outside of position or opinion pieces, the field has devoted surprisingly little empirical attention to the topic in mainstream general social-psychology journals, aggression and violence journals, or even in specialized race-themed journals (see the 10-year trend documented in Table 1). Against this backdrop it is disappointing and somewhat worrying that psychological scientists weigh in strongly and negatively on its legitimacy as a construct (e.g., Haidt, 2017; Lilienfeld, 2017a; Thomas, 2008). Much of this debate has arguably become mired in distractions, such as the semantic utility of the term “aggression” or whether intentions are an essential element (for more on these debates, see, e.g., Goodstein, 2008; Haidt, 2016, 2017; Lilienfeld, 2017a, 2017b, 2020; Schacht, 2008; Sue et al., 2007, 2008, 2019; Thomas, 2008; Williams, 2020a, 2020b). 1 Rather than engage in a point-by-point account of each side of the debate, the goal of the current article is to contextualize larger trends in the field that have emerged during the period during which the concept of microaggressions have been championed but summarily dismissed as “colorful” (Haidt, 2017) or “macrononsense” (Thomas, 2008). The purpose is to offer some insights from a social-psychological perspective grounded within the prejudice domain and to express concerns about the role of psychology in shaping (as well as studying) society. It is, I argue, critical to situate the discussion of microaggression within a broader context of recent developments and trends in the fields of social and political psychology, most of which have emerged with insufficient commentary or reflection in our journals. Of particular interest are the notions of concept creep, moral foundations theory, and political “symmetry” in prejudice, three prongs of inquiry that are gaining considerable traction in academia.
Microaggression Research in Predominantly Empirical Psychology Journals, January 2010 to June 2020
Note: Searches for mentions of “microaggress*” captured microaggression, microaggressive, microaggressing, and so on. Journals emphasizing conceptual or review articles were excluded. Searches were conducted using APA Psych Net.
Thread 1: Concept Creep
Haslam (2016) introduced the idea of concept creep, arguing that considerations of harm have been substantially expanded by psychologists to now include domains that were outside of consideration decades previously. Horizontal creep, he suggested, “occurs when a concept extends to a qualitatively new class of phenomena or is applied in a new context” (p. 2). Within a prejudice context, Haslam suggested that horizontal creep has been evidenced by researchers shifting from an almost sole focus on racism to now covering prejudices against sexual minorities and even speciesism. As a result, more categories or instances are brought under the umbrella of prejudice. Vertical creep, in contrast, “occurs when a concept’s meaning becomes less stringent, extending to quantitatively milder variants of the phenomenon to which it originally referred” (Haslam, 2016, p. 2). For example, new symptoms might be considered in diagnosing a specific disorder. This latter form of creep is perhaps most relevant to the discussion of microaggressions. Haslam argued that the microaggression concept now incorporates symptoms or indicators of prejudice that would not have previously been considered relevant to the diagnosis or ascription of prejudice (such as behavioral omissions or expressions of anxiety).
In his analysis, Haslam (2016) reviewed six case studies covering abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addition, and prejudice, many of which are germane to the microaggression concept. The general message from this conceptual-creep perspective is that the field has grown too rapidly in expanding what counts as harm to another individual (or group). One implication is that the categories become watered down and transition toward becoming meaningless. In addition to psychologically robbing people of agency, it leads down the path, according to Haslam, of encouraging people to consider themselves victims (see also Haidt, 2017; Lilienfeld, 2017a; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018). These points may have merit, but one might also wonder whether minimizing the traumas and aggressions allegedly suffered by a disadvantaged and subordinated group as mere concept creep risks robbing people (and groups) of agency (for related but distinct points, see also Cikara, 2016).
Within the prejudice domain, Haslam (2016) raised several key creep-relevant concerns and objections. He noted that prejudice, as studied by seminal figures such as Allport (1954), initially captured antipathy and dislike but has since expanded to include more subtle and unconscious bias and can even include (paternalistic) positivity. As a prejudice researcher, however, I consider such trends not only understandable but also necessary. As Western societies became more sensitive toward and disapproving of outward displays of blatant prejudice, researchers expanded their operationalization of prejudice to explain the continued existence of bias and discrimination present in many objective indicators (e.g., hiring, health care). Failure to have expanded the concept of prejudice would have come at a tremendous cost to understanding and capturing contemporary intergroup relations. Relatedly, Haslam lamented that prejudice has shifted toward a stronger emphasis on omissions (i.e., not engaging in an activity) and feelings of anxiety. Yet prejudice research has long investigated both actions and inactions. The domain of intergroup contact involves both actions, such as interacting with an out-group member, and inactions, such as avoidance (Allport, 1954). 2
Consider also studies on decisions by police to shoot suspects (e.g., Correll et al., 2007) or to pull over and charge drivers as a function of target race (e.g., Moon & Corley, 2007). From an intergroup-relations perspective, examining both action and inaction is critical because intergroup transactions can involve actions (e.g., physical violence) and omissions (e.g., failing to hire, promote, or help a minority member), an important point considering that intergroup bias more often reflects in-group favoritism than anti-out-group negativity (Brewer, 1999; Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014; Hewstone et al., 2002). Likewise, a large body of work has clearly established that prejudice is relevant to feelings of awkwardness, anxiety, and desires for avoidance (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004; Stephan, 2014; Stephan & Stephan, 2000). Indeed, meta-analytic evidence suggests that feeling anxious about an out-group predicts prejudice (mean r = .46) to a comparable degree as feeling threatened either realistically/tangibly (mean r = .42) or symbolically (mean r = .45) by that group (Riek et al., 2006). Anxiety has proven itself to be of great relevance to modern expressions of intergroup bias; its conceptual exclusion would limit, not enhance, our understanding of prejudice or microaggressions.
With regard to Haslam’s observation that the field has moved from a focus on racism to many other biases (e.g., anti-LGBT+ bias, speciesism), this trend also reflects an increasingly nuanced understanding of the contemporary nature of prejudice. We study distinct prejudices because they are, in some ways, unique from each other. For instance, White-held prejudice against Black people (or Muslim-held prejudice against Christians) can involve very little contact with or knowledge about the out-group, whereas men’s prejudice toward women involves relations of a very intimate nature and considerable contact. We study multiple prejudices because we cannot necessarily or directly translate what we learn from one domain (e.g., racism) and apply it to another (e.g., sexism, homophobia) without recognizing the between-group differences in contact, power relations, historical background, and so on. But the study of multiple prejudices has also proven instrumental in informing us about the nature of prejudice itself because biases tend to be systematically correlated, meaning that those higher in one prejudice (e.g., racism) tend, on average, to be higher on other prejudices (e.g., sexism, anti-LGBT+ bias), a robust finding known as generalized prejudice (Allport, 1954; Bergh et al., 2016; Hodson et al., 2017). Asking questions about the commonality among distinct biases reveals the importance of individual differences and can isolate the underlying factors that link distinct biases (see Hodson & Dhont, 2015). For instance, ethnic prejudice and speciesism are positively related because of their common association with social-dominance orientation rather than right-wing authoritarianism or political conservatism (Dhont et al., 2016). Thus, dominance motives, rather than those pertaining to tradition or conventionality, explain the relation. Such findings highlight the underlying reasons why distinct biases nonetheless “go together” and thus are not evidence of needless creep.
As a result, most of the observed expansion in the prejudice domain, including movement into discussions about microaggressions, has been concerned with answering calls to better understand prejudice and to capture its variance in the world, and it is not simply the result of a social agenda. Haslam (2016), however, entertained a starkly different possibility: Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda [emphasis added] of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed, and the growth of the field and its increased focus on negative phenomena—social and personal harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda [emphasis added]. (p. 13)
Haslam asserts that his warnings about the implications for dominant group members merely document trends, but they also speak to nonconceptual concerns about the expansion of psychological concepts. Consider the following passage: First, by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes [emphasis added]. (p. 14)
One could be forgiven for reading into such passages notable discomfort and pushback at the prospect of shifting norms and classification standards that undermine the status quo, whereby those with relatively more power (e.g., White people, men) ordinarily shape the socially determined parameters of “harm.” Haslam is not alone in expressing such concerns. Bestselling author and academic Jonathan Haidt posited creep as a key factor underlying the “coddling” of the American mind (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018; see also Haidt, 2016, 2017), which, he argued, promotes a “safetyism” that makes people unduly sensitive to threats of harm. With regard to microaggressions specifically, Haidt (2017) minimized or trivialized them offhand as “colorful.” He strongly objected to subjective criteria being in the hands of the target/recipient (Haidt, 2017; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018), despite this objection stemming from a misreading of the microaggression concept (see Williams, 2020b). He also claimed that the goal or purpose of microaggression training is to deliberately make people feel victimized and overly sensitive to threats, in order to strategically boost the victim-pool size in service of an agenda (Haidt, 2016). In his writing, there is very little indication that he worries about overlooking inflammatory intergroup dynamics, inequalities, and resentments. His apprehensions, like those of Haslam, seem predominantly concerned about making errors in classifying actions (or inactions) as prejudice, as in the case with microaggressions, and not at all with the converse error of failing to recognize biases as biases. Psychological scientists ordinarily attempt to balance Type I errors (claiming evidence for an effect when none is warranted) and Type II errors (claiming null findings when effects might exist). Our discipline identifies each as a problematic error and recognizes that satisfying one comes at a cost to the other—that it is a balancing act—with the goal of reasonably weighing the pros and cons of each error. Outside of microaggression research, we rarely bear witness to ideas being summarily dismissed, putting all of our eggs into the Type 1 basket of concerns, particularly when exploring relatively new, nuanced, or emerging ideas.
Thread 2: Moral Foundations Theory
Curiously, while minimizing the validity of microaggressions and objecting to the idea that the expansion of threats and harms has crept too far, in another line of work Haidt actively argued for concept expansion, specifically to incorporate moral values or virtues relatively more strongly endorsed by the political right. In what has become known as moral foundations theory (MFT; Graham et al., 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007), these researchers have questioned how morality, at least in Western thinking and certainly in academia, has come to focus heavily on (social) justice. Turiel (1983), for instance, argued that morality concerns “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other” and concerns “experiences involving harm to persons, violations of rights” (p. 3). Haidt and Graham argued that such moral concern is about “protecting individuals,” but that morality, to many people, is about more than protecting the rights of others. They proposed a broader moral foundations framework that examines how those on the political left versus those on the political right inform their sense of morality.
Haidt and Graham found five moral foundations at play (Graham et al., 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007). The first two are termed individualizing foundations and reflect concerns that are relevant largely to liberals and those on the political left: (a) harm/care and (b) fairness/reciprocity. The former is particularly relevant to emotions such as compassion and empathy and to prosociality (e.g., kindness to others), whereas the latter is considered more transactional in nature, with species evolving to help others (in part) to boost their own genetic success and minimize conflict. The next three foundations are termed binding foundations and are theoretically more relevant to those on the political right: (c) in-group/loyalty (prioritizing and valuing one’s own group relative to others or out-groups); (d) authority/respect (subordinating, being respectful rather than disobedient, and valuing hierarchy); and (e) purity/sanctity (the disavowal of those prioritizing carnality such as lust and greed, which are relevant to emotions such as disgust). The function of the binding foundations is presumably to generate cohesions within social circles and to demarcate sharper lines between groups, prioritizing social control rather than minimizing individual harm per se. In general, researchers have confirmed that liberals and the political left primarily emphasize harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives and the right relatively de-emphasize those concerns and boost emphasis on in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity (Graham et al., 2009; Milfont et al., 2019; Silver & Silver, 2017).
MFT has emerged as “one of the most influential perspectives” for explaining left-right differences in morality (Weber & Federico, 2013, p. 121) and is characterized as “the dominant theory of morality over the last decade” (Davis et al., 2017, p. 124; see also Ellemers et al., 2019). Yet a growing chorus of critics consider the central ideas to be on shaky ground. Although some have failed to replicate the basic foundation pattern (e.g., Landy & Bartels, 2018), others have replicated the basic patterns but question their meaning or interpretation (Davis et al., 2017; Sinn & Hayes, 2017; Suhler & Churchland, 2011). Others find the methodology that is typically used problematic (e.g., K. Gray & Keeney, 2015), and others question whether MFT can deal with the complexity of ideological thinking, given that the foundations do not map clearly onto distinct conservative subgroups (Weber & Federico, 2013). Others have found that the moral foundations themselves are not stable (hindering reliability) and, more problematically, that between-persons variability is not clearly linked to ideological positions (Smith et al., 2017). It is problematic for the theory that recent longitudinal research has revealed not only that ideology is more stable than are moral foundations but also that ideology is a better predictor of moral intuitions than moral intuitions are of ideology (Hatemi et al., 2019).
Moral foundations thus appear to operate more as rationalizations or justifications of ideologies than as bases that underpin or cause ideological thinking. Others have questioned whether liberals and conservatives differ meaningfully in moral foundations, arguing that harm (and individualizing) is actually central and primary to both liberals and conservatives (Schein & Gray, 2015) or that it can become so; conservatives become more like liberals when encouraged to think abstractly (Napier & Luguri, 2013) or put under cognitive load (Wright & Baril, 2011). Several of these critiques are consistent with the proposition that conservatives rely on the binding foundations as rationalizations for their moral choices and decisions (Hatemi et al., 2019; Wright & Baril, 2011), drawing into question whether MFT reveals much about why liberals and conservatives view the world differently but instead informs about how they differ in presenting arguments in defense of their worldviews.
So why does MFT have a strong presence in research on the psychology of morality? What does this tell us about our field? In some ways this is a difficult question to answer. Although the take-home message appears to be that liberals and conservatives might draw on different moral foundations or intuitions, Haidt and colleagues are less clear on the implications of holding few versus many foundations for (theoretically) driving moral thinking. But their choice of language affords insights into their thinking. For instance, Graham and colleagues (2009) emphasized that conservatives (vs. liberals) “construct” or “distribute” their moral systems “more evenly,” terms that in most contexts hold positive connotations and evoke notions of mental balance and equilibrium. The higher number of values or moral foundations used by the right (vs. the left) also lends itself to a “more is better” heuristic, particularly in the absence of clear discussions of the implications of foundation numbers. Even setting the content of the foundations aside, it is not clear whether having more moral foundations, or spreading them out more evenly, is beneficial for moral judgments or relevant in considering microaggressions. The greater number of moral foundations available to draw from to justify a position, the more that one can shift goalposts and/or rationalize the thought. Imagine having 25 moral foundations to draw from—one could engage in virtually any behavior and have a moral reason at hand to justify that decision or action. In Western legal and social traditions in recent centuries, we have narrowed the focus to a largely harm-based theme presumably for this reason.
A related issue is evident in the MFT literature, as captured by the following passage: Liberals refused to make trade-offs on most of the individualizing items but were more willing to perform actions that violated the three binding foundations. Conservatives, in contrast, showed a more even distribution of concerns [emphasis added] and reported more unwillingness than did liberals to accept money to act in ways that violate Ingroup, Authority, and Purity concerns. (Graham et al., 2009, p. 1037; emphasis added throughout)
Given the common usage of words and phrases such as “refusal,” “trade-offs,” “more even distributions,” and “violate,” one could be forgiven for interpreting the intended message as communicating that how conservatives handle moral decisions is more appropriate, with implications for addressing versus dismissing microaggressions. Yet it is not clear whether morality is a domain in which people should readily make trade-offs around harming others, particularly if doing so serves one’s in-group or operates against one’s out-group.
Graham et al. continued: Liberals generally justify [emphasis added] moral rules in terms of their consequences for individuals; they are quite accustomed to balancing competing interests and to fine-tuning social institutions to maximize their social utility. Conservatives, in contrast, are more likely to respect [emphasis added] rules handed down from God (for religious conservatives) or from earlier generations. (p. 1037)
The tone here suggests that liberals rationalize their concerns for others and pull the strings in society to maximally drive social mores. Conservatives, in contrast, come across as reverential of God, elders, and customs. Yet history is replete with examples of the negative implications of defending otherwise immoral behavior on the grounds of God’s will or for reasons of tradition.
Perhaps these implications can be highlighted using a fictitious illustration relevant to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the question of microaggressions. Hospitals are currently charged with making difficult and often moral decisions about which lives to save to maximize resources and “flatten the curve.” Now that a vaccine has been developed, health-care providers and/or politicians will need to make decisions about where test participants should be drawn from and who should be the first (vs. last) to receive it. Regardless of the content of moral concerns, affording these decision makers more (vs. fewer) moral foundations would allow them to more easily make the decisions that best suit their interests yet pair those decisions with a moral foundation. Now let us add in content. Should such decisions be based on moral foundations such as in-group loyalty, whereby more vaccines go to White men (reflecting the decision-making bodies in most governments and hospital administrations)? Should they be based on authority, such that those with higher status are at the front of the queue? Should decisions be based on purity or sacredness, with vaccines presumably awarded to those deemed most virtuous, pure, and symbolically clean? Alternatively, should society be guided by compassion and empathy (i.e., harm/care) and develop systems of equity (fairness) for delivering life-saving interventions? The latter is arguably a stronger basis for morality, stripping aside which left-right ideology tends to be affiliated with which foundation(s).
Indeed, with prejudice and intergroup relations in mind, social psychologists have long been concerned about the multiple origins of prejudice, many of which are reflected in the so-called binding foundations. In-group favoritism and pro-in-group sentiment, along with desires to demarcate sharper lines between in-groups and out-groups, is a strong underlying component of social-identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and, to some extent, its offshoot—self-categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987). Deference to in-group fealty is a strong factor driving intergroup tensions, and the field has generally recognized that intergroup life is more rooted in in-group love than out-group hate (e.g., Brewer, 1999; Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014; Hewstone et al., 2002). Microaggressions can thus be as supposedly “minor” as a preference for one’s own group or a mild distaste or disdain for the out-group, yet they bear serious implications for disadvantaged groups. Likewise, researchers have long drawn attention to factors such as respect for and submission to authority as causes of prejudice (e.g., Allport, 1954; Altemeyer, 1996), along with the acceptance and promulgation of intergroup hierarchy (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) or an unequal status quo (Jost, 2020), reflected in constructs such as right-wing authoritarianism, social-dominance orientation, and system justification, respectively.
Researchers have also increasingly recognized the important of disgust, which is particularly relevant to notions of purity and sanctity, as an exacerbator of prejudice (e.g., Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005; Harris & Fiske, 2006; Hodson & Costello, 2007; Hodson et al., 2013; Navarette & Fessler, 2006). To suggest that liberals (and by both suggestion and inference academics in general) “have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two [individuating] foundations, and therefore misunderstand [emphasis added] the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations” (Haidt & Graham, 2007, p. 98) seems to miss the wider discussion about bias, prejudice, and microaggressions. It is unlikely that a relatively liberal professoriate has missed these foundations but rather has accrued sufficient evidence to determine that “moral” foundations such as in-group loyalty, deference to authority/tradition, and appeals to purity fuel prejudicial thinking (see also Kugler et al., 2014). For instance, trade-offs that pit sanctity/purity against harm/care but prioritize the former generate dehumanizing representations toward marginalized and stigmatized out-group targets and fuel prejudice and discrimination (Monroe & Plant, 2019).
The anticipated response from its advocates is that the goal of MFT has been to describe and document differences between the political left and right, much as Haslam (2016) asserted that he was documenting more than prescribing. But such a response, if levied, would raise the question about the overall point of MFT; the theory leaves the reader hungry to learn about the implications of holding relatively more moral foundations, as conservatives do, and how concerns about harm and care are deemphasized and morally “balanced” out by priorities pertaining to one’s own group membership, deference to authority, and notions of symbolic purity ideals. It is especially noteworthy that authors such as Haidt have argued against concept creep, in particular the broadening scope of liberal concerns about harm such as microaggressions, while paradoxically arguing for broadening the scope of conservative moral concerns, many of which (e.g., in-group loyalty) are unlikely to improve the lives of disadvantaged people or ameliorate intergroup animosities and resentments. Further muddying the waters and the field’s ability to grapple with the question of microaggressions, these two noted trends have been accompanied by a third that warrants our attention.
Thread 3: Prejudice Symmetry on the Left and Right
Most social-psychological research on prejudice has focused on relatively disadvantaged and/or marginalized social groups such as Black people, women, and the LGBT+ community as targets (see Hodson & Dhont, 2015; Sibley & Duckitt, 2008; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Such groups hold relatively less power and status and—relative to White people and men and cisgender heterosexuals—tend to suffer worse outcomes in life (e.g., lower pay, worse health-care treatment, assault). However, over the past decade the number of target groups considered has expanded substantially, especially the number of groups aligned with the political right. This trend documents what is referred to as the “symmetrical” nature of biases expressed by liberals and conservatives (or the left and the right). This new school of thinking predominantly relies on feeling thermometers (single-item ratings of groups from strong dislike to strong like) or social-distance measures (for a review, see Brandt & Crawford, 2020). The gist of this research involves participants rating a range of social groups, from conservative (or conservative-related, such as police officers) to liberal (or liberal-related, such as feminists). This research operates on the premise that traditional research streams have overly focused on left-leaning targets (Black people, gay people, women), giving a false and skewed account of how those on the right tend to score relatively higher in prejudice than those on the left. Incorporating conservative social targets to rate, the reasoning goes, will allow space for liberals to also show bias (hence the notion of prejudice or bias “symmetry”).
A key early study by Chambers and colleagues (2013) asked participants to evaluate liberals and conservatives, as well as groups that vary in their political association or affiliation, such as gay people, civil-rights activists, and Black people (considered “liberal) or the rich, Christian fundamentalists, and the military (considered “conservative”). Across three cross-sectional samples in Study 1, the authors claimed support for the symmetry proposition (liberals and conservatives being equally biased against their out-groups), and where target race and ideology were experimentally manipulated (Studies 2 and 3), participants disliked political (not racial) out-groups. Particularly germane to the microaggression topic, however, is the supposed symmetry between liberals and conservatives in their attitudes toward other social groups (not simply each other). Brandt (2017), for instance, undertook an ambitious project using existing data to build a model before testing the model in other data sets. He explored models in which perceived ideology of the out-group (e.g., Black people as liberal) was tested as a predictor, alone but also in conjunction with the target group’s status and choice in group membership, to predict group liking on thermometer measures. Best supported were the simpler models, specifically those for which the perceived ideology of the out-group target predicted attitudes toward that group. He took this as evidence of an ideological symmetry, that prejudice is merely (or largely) about disliking those seen as ideologically dissimilar to one’s own political group.
One possible implication of this interpretation is that those on the right, in their opposition to groups such as Black people and gay people, are simply pushing back against people and groups associated with liberal ideology (and nothing more odious). Following from such reasoning, more traditional research has claimed to have “confounded the target group with its political ideology (e.g., African Americans tend to be politically liberal), which makes it difficult to know what aspect of the target group (e.g., race or ideology) triggers conservative intolerance” (Brandt et al., 2014, p. 29). This narrative essentially communicates a “nothing-to-see-here” message: You are not seeing racism; you are seeing opposition to liberals (and Black people tend to be quite liberal).
Such an interpretation has clear implications for the microaggression discussion. Such interpretations problematically sidestep many of the critical dynamics underlying interracial relations in the world today. Imagine how such implications might be interpreted in a wider, racially tense climate. For instance, statues of Confederate generals in the American South exemplify an environmental microaggression toward Black people (per Sue et al., 2007). It would be a stretch (if not an error) to argue that opposition to the removal of such statues stems simply from a dislike of liberals and has little to do with race relations and intergroup dominance. The former position would constitute a pivot from a White–Black dynamic to suggest a liberal-conservative dynamic, distracting from King’s plea to better understand the pain experienced by Black people frustrated at the slow pace of social change.
Objection 1: In-group preference is already recognized
With regard to the topic of microaggressions, I propose three main objections to this line of prejudice-symmetry argument. First, the position is a distraction to the wider prejudice story because group members preferring their own groups is already a long-standing staple in social psychology, virtually a truism by this point. Many prominent theories have incorporated this proposition, including social-identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and contact theory (Allport, 1954; Brown & Hewstone, 2005), and it is captured by global reviews from influential prejudice researchers (e.g., Brewer, 1999; Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014; Hewstone et al., 2002). Many theoretical approaches already emphasize that people express dislike toward those with differing values, including symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981), modern racism (McConahay et al., 1981), integrated-threat theory (Stephan & Stephan, 2000), belief-congruence theory (Rokeach et al., 1960), and similarity-attraction theory (Byrne, 1961). Other theories, such as social-dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), make very clear that those with right-leaning ideologies are drawn to and favor hierarchy-enhancing organizations (police, armed services) and by extension their agents (officers, military personnel); in contrast, those with left-leaning ideologies hold relatively more negative attitudes toward such targets. The fact that liberals would dislike those with nonliberal values is neither new nor worthy of debate, rendering its recent prominence a distraction from the goals of understanding and combatting prejudice, a point that brings us to the second and more central concern.
Objection 2: Decontextualized negative attitudes are not necessarily prejudices
Put simply, disliking an out-group is not equivalent to a prejudice by default. It is true that prejudice researchers have historically operationalized prejudice as a negative attitude (see Dixon et al., 2012, Table 1), as have I in my own work (e.g., MacInnis & Hodson, 2012, 2017), being influenced heavily by Allport’s (1954) strong emphasis on hostility and antipathy. This practice is less problematic, however, when studying attitudes toward a group that is marginalized and lacks power or prestige. It becomes problematic when making comparisons across groups that differ in power or status. This point is made poignantly by Badaan and Jost (2020), who argue that a decontextualized focus on negativity alone “could lead to bizarre, morally indefensible claims, such as the notion that Jews were just as ‘prejudiced’ against Nazis as Nazis were against Jews” (p. 231). That is, ignoring context, history, and power differentials is risky and ill-advised if seeking to understand prejudice dynamics.
Of prime importance to the current discussion, the social-psychological field of prejudice research no longer confines the prejudice construct to negative attitudes and certainly does not encourage decontextualized interpretations. As reflected Table 2, the contemporary take on prejudice is that (a) positivity can nonetheless reflect bias, such as when men can love and cherish women but accept pay inequality and unequal corporate and political representation; (b) the context of the expression is critical to understanding the communication, both historical and current; (c) power and status differentials play a central role in the intergroup dynamic; and (d) the function of prejudicial attitudes, the reasons why we hold our positive or negative attitudes, are critical considerations.
Prejudice Operationalizations or Emphases That Encapsulate More Than Disliking or Antipathy
Much of this perspective is strikingly absent in discussions about prejudice symmetries despite being central to thinking critically about prejudice and especially microaggressions. With these distinctions in mind, microaggression-loaded comments such as “Where are you from?” and “When I look at you I don’t see color” (Sue et al., 2007, Table 1) can be packed with context, nuance, and meaning that stresses otherness and denial of racial inequalities, not to mention historical tensions. Likewise, men can “like” women, and even praise them effusively, but nonetheless accept pay inequities that essentially require women to work one day a week for free (see Hodson et al., 2020). To the contemporary prejudice researcher in social psychology, prejudices, and by extension microaggressions, concern keeping groups in their place (and inequities entrenched), rationalizing intergroup relations, controlling others, and expressing power. Indeed, in the words of Dixon and colleagues (2012), when it comes to prejudice, “simple antipathy is the exception rather than the rule” (p. 411). The symmetrical-prejudice debate is therefore very much out of step with the field’s current understanding about what prejudice is. If we ignore that the disdain for a group characterized by power, authority, and resources is psychologically distinct from (and has different implications from) disdain for someone with dark skin or who conceptualizes love within a same-sex framework, we do a disservice to goals of understanding prejudice and answering King’s call.
Objection 3: Decontextualized equating of social targets
The third objection builds on this last point. Prejudice is not only about more than disliking (or antipathy) but also—if one equates target groups without regard to the social context—about negating the critical intergroup dynamic in need of study. Finding that liberal ideology predicts dislike for bankers or the police is not equivalent in any meaningful sense to conservative ideology predicting dislike for civil-rights leaders or union members given that the former enjoy considerably more power and status in society. Likewise, liberal ideology predicting dislike for rich people is not equivalent to conservative ideology predicting dislike for Black people, women, or LGBT+ people. “Punching up” is the not the same as “punching down,” something routinely taught to children on the schoolyard. It is little wonder that psychology is ill-equipped to deal adequately with the microaggression concept given such artificial equating of target groups that ignores history, context, and power/status.
Consider the finding that liberals (vs. conservatives) relatively dislike the military and the police, groups that enhance hierarchies in ways that generally disadvantage minority groups (e.g., Gatto et al., 2010; Pratto et al., 1998; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) and play a role in enforcing the “New Jim Crow” realities (Alexander, 2010; Hinton & Cook, 2021). Here, context is critical. A review of the U.S. law-enforcement climate in its largest cities concluded that “out of the 20 city police departments surveyed in this study, not one met the minimum standards established by human rights law” established internationally (University of Chicago Law School, 2020, p. 6). Given that Black people are disproportionately targeted by the police, is it any wonder that liberals (vs. conservatives) hold relatively less positive attitudes toward the police than other groups (e.g., Black people)? Is a negative attitude toward an organization that systematically fails to meet human-rights standards a “prejudice” in a meaningful sense intended by civil-rights leaders such as King? Likewise, bankers and “the rich” are invested in entrenching inequalities, and religious fundamentalists fight to control the reproductive rights of women. In the United States these targets are powerful, nonstigmatized, and heavily invested in maintaining existing power structures. In contrast, those with right-leaning ideologies tend, on average, to express bias against racialized others, women (especially if nontraditional), and LGBT+ people (e.g., Sibley & Duckitt, 2008; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), all of whom have relatively less power and are more stigmatized and more marginalized. Thus, not only is out-group (dis)like an inadequate measure to capture the psychology of prejudice, but ignoring the contextual power dynamic inherent in the situation, as is common when leveling critiques against the microaggression concept, further pushes one away from understanding and ultimately resolving intergroup conflict. 3
The relatively nascent but prominent discussion of prejudice asymmetry in the field sidesteps the power dynamics and functions of prejudice and, by focusing heavily on disliking or distancing, provides an inaccurate representation of intergroup relations. It distracts us from better understanding racism, sexism, homophobia, and other biases against marginalized groups. Whereas discussing commonalities in biases (e.g., generalized prejudice) informs us about human nature, claiming equivalences in biases largely ignores human nature. Worse, it can provide intellectual scaffolding to the All Lives Matter movement, one that pushes back against the Black Lives Matter movement, regardless of the intentions of the researchers. Consider that Brandt and colleagues (2014) floated the possibility that because “many social groups with conservative values tend to be larger in terms of population . . . liberals may be intolerant toward a larger absolute number of individuals” (p. 32). Raising this potential not only is a distraction but also critically ignores the wider social-cultural context of power and status. We see implications of this reasoning in the public discourse. Consider former President Trump’s claims, when trying to divert attention from killings of Black people by the police, that White people are also killed by the police, adding, “more White people, by the way. More White people” (Vazquez, 2020). Although his statement is numerically accurate, because there are more White than Black Americans in the population, Black fatalities at the hands of police are proportionally almost three times higher than for White people (DeGue et al., 2016). It is easy to envision how our science, if it continues to not capture the social context of prejudice and microaggressions, can lay the intellectual foundations for public figures to ignore and dismiss microaggressions against disadvantaged groups.
Discussion
This article opened with a plea from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for psychology to step up its game in studying race relations, particularly in capturing Black psychological experiences. So how are we, as a field, doing? The 1970s through the 1990s were strong years for prejudice research in social psychology, marked by considerable theory development and research on racism, even if not on Black experiences per se (see Shelton, 2000; but on stereotype threat, see Steele, 1997). The field shifted into thinking about implicit prejudices, particularly among White people or dominant groups, in the 1990s (e.g., Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004; Greenwald & Banaji, 2017), an emphasis argued by some to be a distraction (Stewart & Sweetman, 2018). But in defense of implicit-prejudice research, it clearly sought to better understand the psychology of prejudice. In contrast, academic psychology has more recently stepped off track with regard to understanding and tackling what social psychologists consider prejudice. The microaggression concept nicely illustrates the point—many disadvantaged groups vehemently feel targeted by such day-to-day prejudices, but psychology has done little to empirically investigate these prejudices (see Table 1), with prominent academics voicing strong opposition, often to the very idea (e.g., Haidt, 2017; Lilienfeld, 2017a). If he were alive today and could witness the protests across America (and the world) over the continued killings of Black people by the police, King would presumably be despondent over our field’s choices and priorities. Although social psychologists have seriously advanced the study of prejudice, increasingly emphasizing context dependence and focusing less on negativity per se, psychology as a field is ill-equipped to think clearly about microaggressions because we struggle to think clearly about prejudice and harm as higher-level constructs.
Here I have outlined three movements or developments in the field that, even if they do not cause misdirection, impede progress on the study of racism (and sexism, anti-LGBT+ bias, etc.). First are the concerns raised about so-called concept creep (Haslam, 2016): that a liberal agenda has expanded the notion of harm to capture too many phenomena while simultaneously expanding the criteria scope for each, with microaggressions specifically emblematic of this latter concern. Of critical importance are the implications of Haslam’s analysis—expressing concerns in tandem about the number of “isms” (horizontal creep) and what counts as an instantiation or criterion within an “ism” (vertical creep). This double-barreled approach effectively steers the prejudice discourse in a direction that favors the status quo, limiting and controlling what counts as harm and by extension whose interests should be represented or dismissed. Expressing concerns about both types of creep can give voice to those wanting to control both the breadth and scope of analysis relevant to microaggressions more specifically and prejudice more generally.
At this juncture we need to ask ourselves some serious questions about these very consequential issues. At stake is the critical issue of who determines what constitutes harm, the concept at the heart of ethics and morality according to contemporary societal and legal norms and standards (regardless of the claims of some critiqued in this article). If acted on, concerns about concept creep, especially along the vertical dimension most relevant to microaggressions, could effectively invalidate and muzzle the felt experiences by minority groups in disadvantaged positions. With the major power brokers in our field (e.g., editors) being overwhelmingly White (Roberts et al., 2020), this raises the question of who gets to decide whether the field should take seriously or to downplay the claims of harm by minorities. It is even unclear what blind spots are presently held by academic power brokers and how these blind spots might be addressed and remedied.
At present, it is clear that the apprehensions raised by these authors centers on anxieties that a creeping left-leaning agenda has made the field overly sensitive and exceedingly focused on harm (see Haidt & Haslam, 2016). Although Haslam does not directly call for reducing the scope of categorization or analysis, such a corrective is the logical outcome of his argument. Despite some scholars sharing these creep concerns about expanded psychological concepts (Haidt, 2017; Haidt & Haslam, 2016; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018; see also Lilienfeld, 2017a), the field has nonetheless witnessed a strong push to expand the scope of analysis within the domain of morality research. A key conclusion from the MFT (Graham et al., 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007) program is that the study of morality is incomplete without expanding to include in-group favoritism, authority, and purity bases of morality. Yet these constructs are clearly flagged by prejudice research as factors that can cause, exacerbate, or rationalize expressions of prejudice. In light of such findings, Kugler and colleagues (2014) questioned the wisdom and appropriateness of efforts to “broaden” scientific conception of morality in such a way that preferences based on authoritarianism and social dominance are treated as moral . . . and suggest that the explicit goal of incorporating conservative ideology into the study of moral psychology (in order to increase ideological diversity) may lead researchers astray. (pp. 413–414)
Their caveat is worth considering but appears not to have been heeded. Furthermore, in our current discipline, microaggressions are dismissed in large part as mere subjective experiences among Black people (and women), as though subjectivity pushes the concept outside the domain of psychological study—despite a long tradition of deeply valuing subjective experiences as critical (if not essential) to capturing psychological constructs (e.g., Lewin, 1951). 4 Indeed, if psychologists are now turning away from constructs on the basis of their subjectivity, which discipline will be better suited to pick up the mantle?
This disconnect highlights an apparent creep paradox in the psychological literature; researchers express concerns that the discipline overly expands concepts (e.g., harm) alongside concerns—often by the same scholars—that the field requires expansion to incorporate “binding” bases for morality (in-group loyalty, respect, purity/sanctity), the sort that can explain or justify moral decisions and behaviors relevant to harm, including prejudice. This coincides with a third concern that prejudice researchers have been overly focused on prejudices toward socially disadvantaged groups (e.g., Black people) at the expense of prejudices by the left toward groups affiliated with the right (including groups with considerable power and status, such as the police, bankers, and big business). These surface-level contradictions are not truly paradoxical when seen through a political lens: the creep of right-leaning thinking into the study of prejudice (including microaggressions), harm, and morality. This larger trend minimizes concerns such as microaggressions that are voiced by relatively powerless groups such as Black people and women, dismissing them as merely subjective experiences and artificially equating such prejudices with the left’s dislike of the powerful and those maintaining hierarchies, while voicing their own concerns about spreading liberal agendas and rising cultures of victimhood (Haidt, 2017; Haslam, 2016). Each thread on its own may not be detrimental or problematic, but in unison they weave a fabric of distraction that effectively guts the field’s ability to take seriously the study of microaggressions. In a world in which antibanker bias is deemed equivalent to anti-Black bias and, moreover, part of a more “complete” understanding of prejudice, there is little space for awkward but necessary discussions on racial microaggressions. This academic form of “what-about-ism” turns our collective attention away from King’s concerns about oppressed and marginalized groups. Keen to avoid suggestions of intolerance or painting an incomplete picture of prejudice, our relatively left-leaning field appears to be acquiescing to such pressure without paying sufficient heed to the consequences.
This is not to suggest that right-leaning ideas or priorities are wrong (or even wrong in our discipline). But (political) values guide what we prioritize, both individually and collectively, in our field of study. Nationally representative data from Pew show that, when it comes to the issue of how the criminal-justice system treats racial and ethnic minorities, 76% of Democrats but only 20% of Republicans consider the topic a “big problem” (Dunn, 2020). In an appeal to conservative voters in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Republican) laid out the Trump administration’s vision for “redefining” the ranked priorities of rights. He earmarked property rights and religious freedoms as top priorities, with the implication being that reproductive rights, LBGT+ rights, or civil rights are much lower on the agenda (Borger, 2020). Relative to left-leaning priorities, right-leaning priorities are not as central to the goals of social justice. Continued impetus in our field to curb liberal priorities, to expand right-leaning values, or to psychologically equalize decontextualized prejudices will move us away from King’s vision for social science.
Reflections on our arrival at this juncture
These problematic trends are particularly evident in academic, theoretical, or research-focused psychology. In contrast, much of the interest in and support for the microaggression concept originates from the counseling and clinical psychology domains and from researchers who study trauma in general (e.g., Lewis & Neville, 2015; Sue et al., 2007; Williams, 2020a, 2020b). There is a clear disconnect between the ivory tower and the frontline response to trauma, a disconnect that itself signals an underlying problem in need of attention and remedy. One cannot say with certainty why the field of psychology as a collective finds itself at this juncture; most social trends have myriad origins, and science is no exception. And to be clear, many of the authors highlighted here have advanced our understanding of intergroup relations in other ways. Haslam, for instance, has advanced the prejudice field tremendously through his conceptual and empirical work on dehumanization (consistent with the direction urged by King; see Pettigrew, 2018). Moreover, there are presumably some benign reasons for the prejudice-symmetry perspective (to isolate one). Consider that social psychologists tend to be focused conceptually on socially relevant outcomes, such as predicting conformity or racism, whereas those within a tradition of studying personality, individual differences, or political psychology (with a heavy emphasis on differentiating liberals from conservatives) tend to be more focused and interested on conceptual predictors. In the present context, social psychologists are generally focused on prejudices relevant to big problems in society, such as racism and sexism. In the field of social psychology, power and status are now inherently part of that equation. Political psychologists, in contrast, are often more focused on finding and explaining differences between liberals and conservatives (or left- vs. right-leaning people). 5
Much of this distinction concerns emphasis and theoretical grounding. Contemporary prejudice specialists, largely within social psychology, focus on the power dynamic in an intergroup context (see Table 2). Others are happy to equate social groups and, in doing so, disregard power and hierarchy as relevant factors. Thus, when critics refer to the traditional focus on prejudice toward disadvantaged groups such as Black people as “incomplete” if not accompanied by a focus on antibanker or antifundamentalist prejudice (Brandt & Crawford, 2020; Brandt et al., 2014), it is incomplete only to an understanding of left-right differences in attitudes toward a range of groups. However, it is not incomplete with regard to studying the sizable social problems of racism, sexism, or homophobia. The symmetric-prejudice argument works when we ignore power and context, but that type of construct is not prejudice as operationalized by most contemporary social psychologists. Although we can agree that liberals and conservatives dislike each other and their affiliated groups, this point offers nothing new; in-group preference is a staple of most prejudice theories. Nonetheless, this cross-field differential focus on the independent variable (e.g., liberals vs. conservatives) or the dependent variable (e.g., microaggressions) can go a long way in explaining why the prejudice field is wandering off track from its typical objectives.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that the researchers highlighted here are malicious or insincere, although they may have capitalized on political trends in the wider context that are pushing back against social-justice concerns. I am suggesting that their writings (a) are out of step with contemporary social-psychological research on prejudice and (b) fail to reflect on and capture the frustrations and grievances currently expressed by ethnic minorities in underprivileged positions. Note that these are renowned researchers with considerable sway over the direction of the field. And yet, like me, most of these authors presumably identify as White men and thus enjoy a degree of privilege in weighing in on whether anti-Black prejudice is worse than other prejudices (such as that toward the rich) or whether microaggressions are worthy of scientific consideration. Our discipline would arguably be well served if we restarted the microaggression discussion from a position of cultural humility, “the ability to maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented (or open to the other) in relation to aspects of cultural identity that are most important to the [other person]” (Hook et al., 2013, p. 354).
To be even clearer, the point of the current article is to highlight how the prejudice field has gone adrift from its post–World War II mission to study and improve intergroup relations, not to point the finger at specific individuals or researchers. To some extent, the study of intergroup relations in social psychology has misdirected its own efforts. Consider the central role of Henri Tajfel, developer of the highly influential social identity theory. Tajfel was keenly aware of power and context, having himself survived life in occupied Europe as a Jewish man during World War II. But his most cited and central contribution concerned the so-called minimal-group paradigm, in which participants are randomly assigned to ahistorical groups that do not clearly differ in power or status. As documented by Brown (2020), Tajfel essentially pioneered the study of intergroup life “in a vacuum,” affording researchers a method to experimentally study groups, a technique much sought after at the time. In another staple of the social-psychological literature, the Robbers Cave study (Sherif et al., 1961), boys were randomly assigned to groups not differing in status and encouraged to engage competitively. The central takeaway message has traditionally been that perceived competition for resources fuels intergroup hostility. As critical as such studies and paradigms may be to the early systematic study of intergroup processes, their legacy was to lay the groundwork for social psychologists to subsequently be underconcerned about historical power dynamics between groups, perhaps even softening the ground for the introduction of decontextualized concerns about concept creep and prejudice symmetries.
Another problem has been the tendency for psychologists to view prejudice as a topic pertinent to dominant groups (e.g., White people), something done to disadvantaged groups (e.g., Black people), ignoring the latter’s experience and role in the dynamic and in doing so treating them as the object rather than the subject (see Shelton, 2000). As Shelton observed, this neglect might be due to unease with the study of Black people, in racialized contexts, by predominantly White researchers. Regardless of the reasons, the outcome is that the experiences of Black people within the intergroup dynamic have been minimized. In contrast to psychology’s tendency to downplay the background context and power differentials of intergroup dynamics (at least historically), and in contrast to the psychological experiences of the disadvantaged group, disciplines such as sociology and criminology (and especially advocates of critical race theory) begin the conversation through a power lens and prioritize the experiences of the oppressed group (see Delgado & Stefancic, 2007). A core tenet of critical race theory is that those perched higher in dominance hierarchies have converging interests that coalesce around the practice of ignoring the plight of the disadvantaged, something that psychology risks doing on the topic of microaggressions. Indeed, psychology has much to learn from other disciplines on the dynamic nature of power. With a focus on a field of study more than its researchers, my central message is more akin to that of Roberts and colleagues (2020) in documenting a stark absence of the consideration of race and Black voices in the psychological literature. They consider their review “not an indictment of psychological scientists” but “an indictment of psychological science [emphasis added].” The three trends documented in the current article are arguably part of a wider cultural milieu, no doubt reflecting the culture wars playing out in America and beyond, that have crept into our discourse on what constitutes harm, whether subjective experiences matter, what is moral behavior, who is targeted by prejudice, and whether microaggressions are real enough to matter.
There is a certain degree of irony for our field to consider here—microaggressions can involve failing to see race, along with failing to see one’s own role in perpetuating racial inequality. According to Roberts and colleagues (2020), over the course of 44 years the field of psychology has systematically failed to fully see or consider Black people, a point consistent with recent observations that we overwhelmingly study White, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD; Henrich et al., 2010) populations. Given that psychology rarely considers race (Roberts et al., 2020) and scarcely examines microaggressions empirically (see Table 1), it is little wonder that the field is ill-equipped to think clearly about microaggressions, a phenomenon experienced by minority groups. Black graduate students in the prejudice field now learn how anti-Black racism is equivalent to the negative attitudes liberals hold about the rich or religious fundamentalists, and they are and are exposed to musings about how the former possibly might possibly be more damaging, detrimental, or pernicious than the latter (see note 3). In addition, these students read the opinions, often by academics who are not primarily prejudice researchers, that microaggression experiences might simply reflect Black people being overly sensitive (Haidt, 2017; Lilienfeld, 2017a), contrary to subsequent evidence (see West, 2019).
In light of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, there is a clear caveat here for the prejudice field: Dismissing allegations of mistreatment as hypersensitivity or mere subjective experience seriously risks misreading the intergroup dynamic and harm caused, and such dismissal should be contemplated only after fully exhausting attempts to examine the phenomenon. As noted by Williams (2020b), we cannot afford to downplay or ignore these social phenomena. The fact that White scholars are afforded the opportunity and space to dismiss the concerns that Black people have about microaggressions as oversensitivity without a sizable database from which to draw (see Table 1) is consistent with the notion of academic privilege (see Sue et al., 2008). This privilege includes the choices in weighing Type I versus II error (see discussion above). Yet whether we decide to err on the side of catching or missing microaggressions is a decision our field can make collectively. The fact that we have seen, over the last few years, women protesting in the streets wearing pink vagina hats, and people protesting police brutality after the killings of George Floyd and Eric Garner, strongly suggests that our recent trends in psychology are positioning us to err on the wrong side. Oppressed and disadvantaged groups are clearly frustrated at the lack of voice given to their experiences and grievances, yet our science appears inadequately tuned to these contemporary social dynamics. As a field perpetually worried about being irrelevant (Giner-Sorolla, 2019), there is great opportunity for psychology to take seriously the study of microaggressions.
Recommendations for advancing discussions on microaggressions
Below is a list of recommendations aimed at moving the field to the next stage in tackling the question of microaggressions:
Part of the centring of whiteness in academia is that white faculty members are deemed the arbiters of the existence, validity and impact of racism: racism exists when white people say it does. As a result, racism is often disregarded and excused in academic institutions, at the expense of Black people. (Bumpus, 2020, p. 661)
That such prominent scientific outlets still need to publish such statements suggests that science is failing to adequately capture Black experiences. For the microaggression discussion in psychology to develop veracity and reflect current racial dynamics, we should actively support and draw on more non-White voices. Echoing Shelton (2000), we need to recognize the intergroup dynamic with Black people as active participants—not objects. In doing so, we should take care not to conflate or confuse our need to study (a) White people’s prejudices against Black people within a context that directly examines power and status differentials with (b) the need to study Black people’s experiences of microaggressions. The current analysis has revealed that we have fallen short on each point independently. Both need to be addressed without conflating the two.
Potentially relevant domains for the microaggression (or microtransgression) concept. Domains below the red line are currently eligible for thorough consideration.
Closing Thoughts
We have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly “normal”—whether it is while dealing with the healthcare system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in the park.
Without using the term microaggression directly, the first and only Black American president recently reflected on contemporary life for marginalized people. Specifically, he referenced the following incidents: (a) Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, was hunted down (or “lynched”) by several White men (one a former policeman) acting as vigilantes in response to an apparent threat posed by a Black man exercising in public; (b) Christian Cooper, a bird watcher, having a White woman call the police and inform them (falsely) that a Black man was threatening her life, simply because he asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules (Shaw, 2020). These are poignant reminders that the social realities for Black people differ considerably from those of White people, making it difficult at times for White people to accurately perceive or think about intergroup dynamics. It is important to keep in mind that Black people have suffered indignities and injustices for centuries in the United States, as have Indigenous populations, with the effects of trauma not only experienced by the direct recipients but also passed down generations (e.g., Anderson et al., 2015) and “spilling” outward to the wider community (Bor et al., 2018). A psychological science with its house in order would be fully immersed in studies of the Black experience, including microaggressions, heeding the call of King, during a previous period of considerable racial turmoil.
When future historians look back on our own period, with neo-Nazis marching brazenly in the streets of Charlottesville and a U.S. president claiming that there were good people on both sides, they may turn attention to the academic discourse at the time. They will notice that academic psychologists conducted little research on microaggressions yet concluded with considerable confidence that microaggressions (subtle day-to-day negations of Black people) are not legitimate constructs for psychological inquiry (Haidt, 2017; Haslam, 2016; see also Lilienfeld, 2017a). They will also notice that biases from the political left (against bankers, religious fundamentalists, the rich, and the police) were deemed psychologically equivalent to biases from the political right (against Black people, women, LGBT+ people, atheists; Brandt & Crawford, 2020). Until we realign ourselves with the-social justice goals that previously characterized social psychology we will be woefully ill-prepared to deal with the complexities and nuances of microaggressions and their implications. Our discipline has strayed from its previously shared goals of understanding and combatting racism and has instead become a reflection of a polarized world in the 21st century, complete with anxieties about liberal agendas that favor the disadvantaged and distracting what-about-isms regarding negative attitudes toward the powerful or privileged.
In closing his treatise on microaggressions, Lilienfeld (2017a) opined that the microaggression research endeavor “risks inflicting further damage to the already tarnished image of psychology in the public eye” (p. 163). 9 I respectfully disagree and offer an alternative proposition: The failure of our field to take seriously the experiences of racialized people, including the concept of microaggressions (or microtransgressions), risks putting our discipline on the wrong side of history and becoming irrelevant to understanding social changes in the wider population.
