Samuel R Sommer
Biographic Data
| ID | 921297 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Samuel R Sommer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Samuel R |
| FAMILY NAME | Sommer |
| SIGNATURE | SOMMER S R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2981-5396 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 418 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Worse Access, Quality, and Leadership—Redressing the Affirmative Action Ruling’s Litany of Harms
This JAMA Forum discusses the US Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in the context of the potential harms to access to care, quality of care, and leadership for the health care system
White (but Not Black) Americans Continue to See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game; White Conservatives (but Not Moderates or Liberals) See Themselves as Losing
In a 2011 article in this journal entitled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” ( Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 215–218), Norton and Sommers assessed Black and White Americans’ perceptions of anti-Black and anti-White bias across the previous 6 decades—from the 1950s to the 2000s. They presented two key findings: White (but not Black) respondents perceived decreases in anti-Black bias to be associated with i…
Stereotype Threat Among Black Men Following Exposure to Rap Music
Stereotype threat theory argues that reminders of negative stereotypes about one’s stigmatized identity can undermine performance, but few studies have examined this phenomenon among Black Americans. Drawing from the literature on the impact of mass media on stereotype activation, we examine whether exposure to rap music induces stereotype threat among Black men. In two studies, incidental exposure to violent/misogynistic rap, but not conscious h…
Trauma, media and the brain
Racial Biases in Officers’ Decisions to Frisk Are Amplified for Black People Stopped Among Groups Leading to Similar Biases in Searches, Arrests, and Use of Force
Violent encounters between police and Black people have spurred debates about how race affects officer decision-making. We propose that racial disparities in police–civilian interactions are amplified when police interact with Black civilians who are encountered in groups. To test this possibility, we analyzed New York City stop and frisk data for over 2 million police stops. Results revealed that Black (vs. White) people were more likely to be f…
White religious iconography increases anti-Black attitudes
Mere Membership in Racially Diverse Groups Reduces Conformity
Three studies assessed the impact of White individuals’ mere membership in racially diverse or homogeneous groups on conformity. In Study 1, White participants were randomly assigned to four-person groups that were racially diverse or homogeneous in which three confederates routinely endorsed clearly inferior college applicants for admission. Participants in diverse groups were significantly less likely to conform than those in homogeneous groups…
Resolving racial ambiguity in social interactions
Exposure to White religious iconography influences Black individuals’ intragroup and intergroup attitudes
Although there are many contributing factors to explain why Black adults and children may internalize anti-Black attitudes, the potential role religion may play in such processes-specifically the exposure to White religious iconography-cannot be ignored. (PsycINFO Database Record
Examining the Effects of I-Sharing for Future White-Black Interactions
Research shows that I-sharing, or sharing subjective experiences with an outgroup member, positively shapes attitudes toward that outgroup member. We investigated whether this type of social experience would also promote a positive interracial interaction with a novel outgroup member. Results showed that White and Black participants who I-shared with a racial outgroup member (vs. I-sharing with a racial ingroup member) expressed more liking towar…
Thinking Outside the Box: Multiple Identity Mind-Sets Affect Creative Problem Solving
Rigid thinking is associated with less creativity, suggesting that priming a flexible mind-set should boost creative thought. In three studies, we investigate whether priming multiple social identities predicts more creativity in domains unrelated to social identity. Study 1 asked monoracial and multiracial participants to write about their racial identities before assessing creativity. Priming a multiracial’s racial identity led to greater creat…
Priming White identity elicits stereotype boost for biracial Black-White individuals
Psychological threat experienced by students of negatively stereotyped groups impairs test performance. However, stereotype boost can also occur if a positively stereotyped identity is made salient. Biracial individuals, whose racial identities may be associated with both negative and positive testing abilities, have not been examined in this context. Sixty-four biracial Black-White individuals wrote about either their Black or White identity or …
Social Psychology
Toward a Social Psychology of Race and Race Relations for the Twenty-First Century
The United States, like many nations, continues to experience rapid growth in its racial minority population and is projected to attain so-called majority-minority status by 2050. Along with these demographic changes, staggering racial disparities persist in health, wealth, and overall well-being. In this article, we review the social psychological literature on race and race relations, beginning with the seemingly simple question: What is race? …
Essentialist thinking predicts decrements in children’s memory for racially ambiguous faces
Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of results. They also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts children's memory for faces. Seventy-four White children (ages 4-9 years) completed a face-memory task compris…
Monoracial and Biracial Children: Effects of Racial Identity Saliency on Social Learning and Social Preferences
Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences t…
When the half affects the whole: Priming identity for biracial individuals in social interactions
Honk if you like minorities: Vuvuzela attitudes predict outgroup liking
The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa generated extensive controversy over spectators' use of the African vuvuzela trumpet. We asked 123 White American participants about their opinions of vuvuzelas as well as their attitudes towards a variety of racial/ethnic minority groups including immigrants, African Americans, and Latinos. We found that the less participants liked vuvuzelas, the less positively they also tended to feel toward minority gro…
Racial Color Blindness: Emergence, Practice, and Implications
In this article, we examine the pervasive endorsement of racial color blindness—the belief that racial group membership should not be taken into account, or even noticed—as a strategy for managing diversity and intergroup relations. Despite research demonstrating the automatic perception of race (and thus the seeming improbability of actual color blindness), the color-blind approach to race has become increasingly prevalent in a variety of import…
Getting a word in group-wise: Effects of racial diversity on gender dynamics
Living with an other-race roommate shapes Whites' behavior in subsequent diverse settings
Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis
This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N = 12,463) comparing dyadic interracial and same-race interactions, predominantly featuring Black and White Americans. …
Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing
Although some have heralded recent political and cultural developments as signaling the arrival of a postracial era in America, several legal and social controversies regarding “reverse racism” highlight Whites’ increasing concern about anti-White bias. We show that this emerging belief reflects Whites’ view of racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived bias against Blacks over the past six decades are associated with increases i…
Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing: (634112013-247)
In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?
Despite receiving little empirical assessment, the color-blind approach to managing diversity has become a leading institutional strategy for promoting racial equality, across domains and scales of practice. We gauged the utility of color blindness as a means to eliminating future racial inequity—its central objective—by assessing its impact on a sample of elementary-school students. Results demonstrated that students exposed to a color-blind min…
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. However, this tendency was often counterproductive, as avoiding race during interracial interaction predicted negative nonverbal behavior (Study 1), a relationship mediated…
Toward a Social Psychology of Race and Race Relations for the Twenty-First Century
The United States, like many nations, continues to experience rapid growth in its racial minority population and is projected to attain so-called majority-minority status by 2050. Along with these demographic changes, staggering racial disparities persist in health, wealth, and overall well-being. In this article, we review the social psychological literature on race and race relations, beginning with the seemingly simple question: What is race? …
On racial diversity and group decision making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations
This research examines the multiple effects of racial diversity on group decision making. Participants deliberated on the trial of a Black defendant as members of racially homogeneous or heterogeneous mock juries. Half of the groups were exposed to pretrial jury selection questions about racism and half were not. Deliberation analyses supported the prediction that diverse groups would exchange a wider range of information than all-White groups. T…
Learning (not) to talk about race: When older children underperform in social categorization
Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development
Lay Theories About White Racists: What Constitutes Racism (and What Doesn't)
Psychological theories of racial bias assume a pervasive motivation to avoid appearing racist, yet researchers know little regarding laypeople's theories about what constitutes racism. By investigating lay theories of White racism across both college and community samples, we seek to develop a more complete understanding of the nature of race-related norms, motivations, and processes of social perception in the contemporary United States. Factor …
Not so black and white: Memory for ambiguous group members
Exponential increases in multiracial identities, expected over the next century, create a conundrum for perceivers accustomed to classifying people as their own- or other-race. The current research examines how perceivers resolve this dilemma with regard to the own-race bias. The authors hypothesized that perceivers are not motivated to include ambiguous-race individuals in the in-group and therefore have some difficulty remembering these individ…
White juror bias: An investigation of prejudice against Black defendants in the American courtroom
Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis
This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N = 12,463) comparing dyadic interracial and same-race interactions, predominantly featuring Black and White Americans. …
Living with an other-race roommate shapes Whites' behavior in subsequent diverse settings
Cognitive effects of racial diversity: White individuals’ information processing in heterogeneous groups
When the half affects the whole: Priming identity for biracial individuals in social interactions
Essentialist thinking predicts decrements in children’s memory for racially ambiguous faces
Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of results. They also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts children's memory for faces. Seventy-four White children (ages 4-9 years) completed a face-memory task compris…
Monoracial and Biracial Children: Effects of Racial Identity Saliency on Social Learning and Social Preferences
Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences t…
Resolving racial ambiguity in social interactions
Race and jury selection: Psychological perspectives on the peremptory challenge debate
The legal system is a domain of potential relevance for psychologists, whether in the capacity of expert witness or citizen juror. In this article, the authors apply a psychological framework to legal debate surrounding the impact of race on the process of jury selection. More specifically, the authors consider race and the peremptory challenge, the procedure by which attorneys may remove prospective jurors without explanation. This debate is add…
Priming White identity elicits stereotype boost for biracial Black-White individuals
Psychological threat experienced by students of negatively stereotyped groups impairs test performance. However, stereotype boost can also occur if a positively stereotyped identity is made salient. Biracial individuals, whose racial identities may be associated with both negative and positive testing abilities, have not been examined in this context. Sixty-four biracial Black-White individuals wrote about either their Black or White identity or …
Getting a word in group-wise: Effects of racial diversity on gender dynamics
Hype and Suspicion: The Effects of Pretrial Publicity, Race, and Suspicion on Jurors' Verdicts
We exposed some mock jurors to pretrial publicity (PTP) biased against the defendant a few days before they read the trial transcript and rendered individual verdicts. Exposure to the PTP prejudiced the jurors toward voting “guilty,” unless they read information within the PTP that indicated that the defendant was African American and that raised suspicion about the racist motives underlying the PTP's reporting. Information designed to raise more…
Determinants and Consequences of Jury Racial Diversity: Empirical Findings, Implications, and Directions for Future Research
One of the ideals underlying any jury system is that those groups of citizens charged with the responsibility of deciding cases should be representative of the communities from which they are selected. Anecdotal and empirical data suggest that reality often falls short of this ideal, however, as many empanelled juries are less diverse than community demographics would dictate. This article reviews the obstacles that stand in the way of jury diver…
Bias in jury selection: Justifying prohibited peremptory challenges
The United States Supreme Court has restricted attorneys from considering the gender and race of potential jurors in their use of peremptory challenges—the practice by which jurors may be removed from a jury without explanation or evidence of potential bias. We propose that forbidding peremptories based on social category information not only fails to decrease biased jury selection, but also encourages attorneys to search—successfully—for neutral…
Mixed motives and racial bias: The impact of legitimate and illegitimate criteria on decision making
Recent high-profile court rulings addressing the influence of illegitimate information--such as race--on decision making have highlighted the difficulty of establishing whether and when discrimination has occurred. One factor complicating such efforts is that decision makers are often simultaneously influenced by racial and nonracial information. The authors examined the psychological processes underlying such mixed-motive decision making, demons…
White juror bias: An investigation of prejudice against Black defendants in the American courtroom
Exposure to White religious iconography influences Black individuals’ intragroup and intergroup attitudes
Although there are many contributing factors to explain why Black adults and children may internalize anti-Black attitudes, the potential role religion may play in such processes-specifically the exposure to White religious iconography-cannot be ignored. (PsycINFO Database Record
Hype and Suspicion: The Effects of Pretrial Publicity, Race, and Suspicion on Jurors' Verdicts
We exposed some mock jurors to pretrial publicity (PTP) biased against the defendant a few days before they read the trial transcript and rendered individual verdicts. Exposure to the PTP prejudiced the jurors toward voting “guilty,” unless they read information within the PTP that indicated that the defendant was African American and that raised suspicion about the racist motives underlying the PTP's reporting. Information designed to raise more…
Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional Attributions
The present studies compare the judgments of White and Black mock jurors in interracial trials. In Study 1, the defendant’s race did not influence White college students’ decisions but Black students demonstrated ingroup/outgroup bias in their guilt ratings and attributions for the defendant’s behavior. The aversive nature of modern racism suggests that Whites are motivated to appear nonprejudiced when racial issues are salient; therefore, the ra…
White juror bias: An investigation of prejudice against Black defendants in the American courtroom
White juror bias: An investigation of prejudice against Black defendants in the American courtroom
Hopes Dashed and Dreams Fulfilled: Contingencies of Self-Worth and Graduate School Admissions
James (1890/1950) argued that self-esteem fluctuates around a typical level in response to successes and failures in domains on which self-worth is staked. In a test of James’s hypothesis, 32 students applying to graduate school completed a measure of contingencies of self-worth, and then for 2 months reported global self-esteem twice a week and any day they heard from a graduate program. As predicted, participants who were higher in basing their…
Contingencies of self-worth: Progress and prospects
Over a century ago, William James (1890) proposed that the impact of success and failure on self-esteem depends on the domains in which self-esteem is invested. In this chapter, we review a relatively new programme of research that aims to (a) develop and validate a measure of this construct, (b) develop the implications of James's idea for psychological vulnerability and self-regulation, and (c) examine the consequences of investing self-esteem …
Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction: Playing the Political Correctness Game
Two experiments explored the ramifications of endorsing color blindness as a strategy for appearing unprejudiced. In Study 1, Whites proved adept at categorizing faces on the basis of race, but understated their ability to do so. In Study 2, Whites playing the Political Correctness Game—a matching task that requires describing other individuals—were less likely to use race as a descriptor when paired with a Black partner than when paired with a W…
Lay Theories About White Racists: What Constitutes Racism (and What Doesn't)
Psychological theories of racial bias assume a pervasive motivation to avoid appearing racist, yet researchers know little regarding laypeople's theories about what constitutes racism. By investigating lay theories of White racism across both college and community samples, we seek to develop a more complete understanding of the nature of race-related norms, motivations, and processes of social perception in the contemporary United States. Factor …
On racial diversity and group decision making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations
This research examines the multiple effects of racial diversity on group decision making. Participants deliberated on the trial of a Black defendant as members of racially homogeneous or heterogeneous mock juries. Half of the groups were exposed to pretrial jury selection questions about racism and half were not. Deliberation analyses supported the prediction that diverse groups would exchange a wider range of information than all-White groups. T…
Mixed motives and racial bias: The impact of legitimate and illegitimate criteria on decision making
Recent high-profile court rulings addressing the influence of illegitimate information--such as race--on decision making have highlighted the difficulty of establishing whether and when discrimination has occurred. One factor complicating such efforts is that decision makers are often simultaneously influenced by racial and nonracial information. The authors examined the psychological processes underlying such mixed-motive decision making, demons…
Bias in jury selection: Justifying prohibited peremptory challenges
The United States Supreme Court has restricted attorneys from considering the gender and race of potential jurors in their use of peremptory challenges—the practice by which jurors may be removed from a jury without explanation or evidence of potential bias. We propose that forbidding peremptories based on social category information not only fails to decrease biased jury selection, but also encourages attorneys to search—successfully—for neutral…
Determinants and Consequences of Jury Racial Diversity: Empirical Findings, Implications, and Directions for Future Research
One of the ideals underlying any jury system is that those groups of citizens charged with the responsibility of deciding cases should be representative of the communities from which they are selected. Anecdotal and empirical data suggest that reality often falls short of this ideal, however, as many empanelled juries are less diverse than community demographics would dictate. This article reviews the obstacles that stand in the way of jury diver…
Learning (not) to talk about race: When older children underperform in social categorization
Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development
Cognitive effects of racial diversity: White individuals’ information processing in heterogeneous groups
Race and jury selection: Psychological perspectives on the peremptory challenge debate
The legal system is a domain of potential relevance for psychologists, whether in the capacity of expert witness or citizen juror. In this article, the authors apply a psychological framework to legal debate surrounding the impact of race on the process of jury selection. More specifically, the authors consider race and the peremptory challenge, the procedure by which attorneys may remove prospective jurors without explanation. This debate is add…
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. However, this tendency was often counterproductive, as avoiding race during interracial interaction predicted negative nonverbal behavior (Study 1), a relationship mediated…
Not so black and white: Memory for ambiguous group members
Exponential increases in multiracial identities, expected over the next century, create a conundrum for perceivers accustomed to classifying people as their own- or other-race. The current research examines how perceivers resolve this dilemma with regard to the own-race bias. The authors hypothesized that perceivers are not motivated to include ambiguous-race individuals in the in-group and therefore have some difficulty remembering these individ…
In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?
Despite receiving little empirical assessment, the color-blind approach to managing diversity has become a leading institutional strategy for promoting racial equality, across domains and scales of practice. We gauged the utility of color blindness as a means to eliminating future racial inequity—its central objective—by assessing its impact on a sample of elementary-school students. Results demonstrated that students exposed to a color-blind min…
Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing
Although some have heralded recent political and cultural developments as signaling the arrival of a postracial era in America, several legal and social controversies regarding “reverse racism” highlight Whites’ increasing concern about anti-White bias. We show that this emerging belief reflects Whites’ view of racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived bias against Blacks over the past six decades are associated with increases i…
Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing: (634112013-247)
Racial Color Blindness: Emergence, Practice, and Implications
In this article, we examine the pervasive endorsement of racial color blindness—the belief that racial group membership should not be taken into account, or even noticed—as a strategy for managing diversity and intergroup relations. Despite research demonstrating the automatic perception of race (and thus the seeming improbability of actual color blindness), the color-blind approach to race has become increasingly prevalent in a variety of import…
Getting a word in group-wise: Effects of racial diversity on gender dynamics
Living with an other-race roommate shapes Whites' behavior in subsequent diverse settings
Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis
This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N = 12,463) comparing dyadic interracial and same-race interactions, predominantly featuring Black and White Americans. …
When the half affects the whole: Priming identity for biracial individuals in social interactions
Psychology (38 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (32 works) · Social Psychology (32 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Race (biology (12 works)