In today’s episode, I speak to Tessa Dover about her research article “Does unfairness feel different if it can be linked to group membership? Cognitive, affective, behavioral and physiological implications of discrimination and unfairness.”  Tessa is a fourth year graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Under the sub-heading of social psychology, she works in understanding the health consequences of various forms of identity threats, which are basically experiences where you feel that your membership in a certain group, or in a certain identity, puts you at risk for some sort of mistreatment or unfairness.

Referring to this article, Tessa stated that “the basic question being asked... is whether discrimination feels different from unfairness that can’t be linked to a group identity.” She continued to say that “The goal with this article was to try to disambiguate the health consequence that can be linked to discrimination from the health consequences that can be linked to just plain old unfairness that anyone might experience.”

I believe that this research article, as well as this interview, provides some great insight into the topic of discrimination, particularly why differing individuals respond to it in differing ways. Feel free to share any thoughts, questions, or insights regarding this topic in the comment section below. Thank you for listening.

Abstract for the Article
We assessed whether unfair treatment leads to different attributional, emotional, behavioral, and cardiovascular responses depending on whether or not the treatment is group-based. Latino and White men (N = 209) were treated fairly or unfairly by an ingroup or outgroup member. As expected, attributions to discrimination were the greatest among those treated unfairly in an intergroup context. Moreover, among those treated unfairly in an intergroup context, Latinos who did not endorse the protestant work ethic (PWE) responded with more anger, had higher attributions to discrimination, and punished the offender more, compared to Whites and high-PWE Latinos. Cardiovascular responses to unfair intergroup treatment did not differ by ethnicity: unfair intergroup treatment was less threatening (more challenging) when low (vs. high) in PWE. Results suggest that for low-status group members responding to unfair intergroup treatment (i.e., discrimination), identifying the treatment as discriminatory and becoming angry may be more cardiovascularly-adaptive than not. Implications are discussed.