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AbstractAdvances in measurement have allowed researchers to empirically distinguish between explicit attitudes, which are conscious and controllable, and implicit attitudes, which are activated automatically without cognitive effort or even awareness. Researchers using these methods have shown that although survey data reveal unprecedented declines in Americans' expressions of overtly racist attitudes, most Americans continue to harbor an implicit pro‐White bias relative to other racial minority groups. This research has generated a great deal of controversy. The primary focus of the controversy has been on the findings that have come out of studies using the Implicit Association Test or IAT – a response‐time computer software program that records the speed with which positive and negative evaluations of different racial groups come to mind. This paper addresses the following questions that continue to divide researchers: (1) What does the IAT measure? (2) How do implicit attitudes as measured by the IAT relate to people's race‐related judgments and behaviors? (3) What are the political and legal implications of being able to measure implicit racial bias?

In this article, we use 198 interviews with young men and women to explore how they define and negotiate boundaries of unwanted sexual contact in public drinking settings. Men and women's contrasting experiences reveal that in bars and nightclubs, sexual aggression against women is routine and typically involves physical threat. For men, however, consensual and nonaggressive contact can register as problematic when disruptive to men's control of heterosexual interactions. Men's aggression toward other men who disrupt their access to women is cause and consequence of women's sexual aggression experiences being less visible. We contribute to sexual assault literature by illustrating how heterosexual power dynamics—specifically, disproportionate visibility and defense of men's desires—shape tolerance of barroom sexual aggression, discourage bystander intervention, and set the stage for more serious forms of assault to occur and go unpunished.

AbstractTheory and research suggest that sexual harassment is often a dominance strategy used to undermine women's power, but the precise relationships between government employees' workplace power, organizational climate, and vulnerability to particular types of sexual harassment remain under-specified. This study analyzes data from the 2016 US Merit Systems Protection Board survey of the federal civilian workforce (the most comprehensive and up-to-date national data on workplace sexual harassment) to test predictions about how employees' workplace power and their agency's efforts to mitigate abuses of power affect their likelihood of experiencing sexual harassment. Findings reveal that women in leadership positions report more sexual harassment than non-leaders, and that team leaders (i.e., those without formal supervisory authority) and executives (i.e., those with the most authority) report more sexual harassment than women in middle management. At the organizational level, sexual harassment occurs in workplaces with higher levels of non-sexual aggression and among employees who perceive their agency as less proactive in preventing and responding to social inequity. Taken together, findings suggest that sexual harassment is a dominance strategy not unlike other forms of aggression used to undermine women in power, and that workplace climates that are effective at mitigating abuses of power reduce the likelihood of experiencing sexual harassment. These results have implications for how government agencies can implement policies that not only prevent harassment but also promote democracy and equity among an increasingly diverse federal workforce.

In this article, we report the results of a randomized controlled experiment that examines how exposure to information about a global pandemic from Asia affects white Americans' prosocial behavior towards white, black, and Asian Americans. We find that when exposed to a new disease threat from Asia, (1) white Americans donate significantly less money to Asian American recipients than to white or black American recipients, (2) liberals and conservatives are equally likely to discriminate, and (3) a significant spike in media attention about violence against Asians inhibited this discriminatory behavior—at least temporarily. Our experiment allows us to rule out alternative explanations for the unequal treatment of Asian Americans, providing evidence of a causal link between the COVID-19 pandemic and racial discrimination. The study contributes to knowledge about the spillover effects of external threats on race relations and has implications for public health and science communication.

The authors describe a pedagogical exercise that conveys the multilayered properties of gender to undergraduate students. They propose a simulation that demonstrates the social constructiveness of gender, maintaining that gender should be conceptualized and portrayed as a process, system of stratification, and social structure. The authors begin by detailing the theoretical premises that guide their conceptualization of gender. Next, they move to the simulation exercise they use to demonstrate their conceptualization, furnishing detailed instructions to successfully implement the exercise and providing suggestions to guide class discussions emerging thereof. The authors conclude by detailing the results of an assessment showing the learning gained through the exercise. This article addresses the lacunae in the sociology of gender, created in particular by the limited nature of scholarship on the teaching of gender as a social construction.

Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women do not, possibly because women face greater social risks for acting on ambiguous status advantages. Women are just as likely as men, however, to treat someone unequally on the basis of an established status distinction. This suggests that men are first movers in the emergence of status distinctions, but women eventually adopt the distinctions as well. Our results show that people readily transform social differences into status distinctions-distinctions that act as formidable forces of inequality.