The world is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. As society becomes more and more diverse, the future demographic landscape will be drastically different from what we know today. What are the consequences of these changes for our psychology? How do our existing values and belief systems influence the way we make sense of demographic diversity? My research engages these questions in three major lines of work.
1. The Psychological Consequences of Social Change
One of the most remarkable social changes we are witnessing today is the increasingly diverse population in society. Demographically, the population growth of racial minorities and the population decline of White individuals are jointly contributing to the growing diversity. However, prior psychological research on population change almost exclusively focused on how the growth of minority populations triggers status threat concerns, overlooking the decline of the majority (White) population. In two papers (Bai, Federico 2019 GPIR; Bai & Federico, 2021 JESP), I show that White people are in fact more attuned to the population decline of their in-group than out-group, which can activate a collective existential threat and in turn trigger inimical consequences such as an increase in levels of racial prejudice and right-wing backlash.
This line of research also investigates how sociodemographic changes interact with the ideological beliefs of both perceivers and targets. For example, I demonstrated in two other papers that our evaluation of an emerging group is primarily determined by whether the group’s cultural values and ideological beliefs are similar to ours, showing that effects like these are further modulated by our own ideological beliefs (Bai, Federico, Simon, working paper; Bai, 2022 GPIR).
Collectively, the first line of my research contributes to the field by introducing a new understanding of how population change can translate into a seismic shift in public opinion. Furthermore, this work highlights the population decline of one’s in-group as an increasingly critical, yet overlooked, aspect of social change that has a distinct impact on contemporary political events.
2. The Critical Role of Ideological Beliefs in the Changing World
As society becomes more diverse, more political leaders are elected from different racial backgrounds. How do we evaluate them? Prior theories posit that people with racist views would support White candidates and oppose minority candidates. However, these theories fail to explain why prejudiced people still sometimes support minority political candidates, such as Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. To solve this puzzle, I proposed an alternative theory: people with racist views tend to support candidates who have conservative or pro-White policy preferences, and they do so regardless of whether the candidates themselves are White. To test my theory against prior theories, I conducted studies with over 40,000 participants using a variety of methods and samples (Bai, 2021 JPSP). I consistently show support for my theory over the prior ones: prejudiced citizens do support conservative candidates, even if the candidates are racial minorities, and in contrast, they oppose liberal candidates, even if the candidates are White.
In follow-up studies, I found that White Americans who have a strong White identity or a narcissistic view of Whiteness tend to support political candidates who also have conservative or pro-White beliefs, even if the candidates are Black, and the same pattern is found for people who have an implicit anti-Black bias (Bai, 2021 SPPS; Bai, working paper). On a theoretical level, these studies demonstrate that leaders’ beliefs often play a more important role in how they are evaluated than their demographic identities. Furthermore, my findings highlight a less visible mechanism of hierarchy preservation: people who are resistant to progressive social change may support minority leaders with hierarchy-preserving ideologies while disguising their prejudice as support for minority rights. This work has important implications for leadership selection. In addition to appointing minorities, diversity initiatives should consider whether the appointed leaders will advocate for minorities in the organization and society.
The Belief-Driven Model of Social Perception. An increasing number of people identify as multiracial. The growth of this population marks a distinct aspect of the growing diversity in society. Through interracial marriages, the multiracial population will eventually replace the distinct racial groups that we know today. Will our social perception of race adapt to these changes? In other words, will we still categorize multiracial people into one racial group versus another, and if so, how? This question is important because if we continue to see a race where there is none, racial biases will ironically outlive the existence of racial category boundaries themselves, and racism will persist in the “post-racial” world.
Building on my finding that a target political candidate’s beliefs can shape our support of them as a leader (Bai, 2021 JPSP), I conducted ten experiments (nine preregistered) to test whether a racially ambiguous target’s beliefs can shape how we perceive their race (Bai, working paper). My experiments show that people visually perceive a target with left-leaning views as darker than one with right-leaning views because they are more likely to identify the left-leaning target as Black. These results emerged not only in the U.S. but also in Mexico and South Africa, and the same pattern is observed among White and Black participants alike.
As more and more people overtly signal their political beliefs in everyday life, I will investigate the specific real-world consequences of this bias in my future research. For example, are people accessorized with liberal symbols more likely to be recognized as Black and, therefore, more likely to experience police brutality and racially motivated mass shootings based on aggressors' split-second perceptions? I am looking forward to answering these important questions in the coming years.
In short, the second line of my research highlights that our belief system plays an often-overlooked, yet critical, role in how we evaluate others in the ever-changing demographic landscape.
3. Interfacing Novel Methods, Techniques, and Technologies
Finally, as a researcher with a strongly empirical approach to theory building, I often engage with new methods and techniques. Sometimes, I invent new techniques and methods to address the challenges I encounter in pursuing my existing research questions. Other times, I leverage novel technologies to address and develop new research questions. Ultimately, this line of research complements my substantive lines of research by equipping me with more rigorous research methods.
For example, in political psychology, party identity and ideology are two of the most frequently studied variables, but their roles were often confounded in past research. To address this, I introduced the Multiple-Matching Perspective (Bai, 2022 PSPB), a novel method of studying correlated predictors that are nested within participants and the target that participants perceive. This method clarifies that many psychological variables can be nested within participants and targets—perceivers have a party identity and ideology, but the perceived target, such as political leaders, can also have a party identity and ideology. By considering these variables from both sides and how they are matched or moderated by each other, this method unveils the nuanced roles of each variable that have confounded past findings.
I have also advanced the field’s research practices concerning data quality issues. Much research in the socio-behavioral sciences relies on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) as a key source of data collection. In 2018, I discovered significant data quality issues on Mturk and soon introduced a method of using participants’ metadata (i.e., repetition of GPS coordinates) to detect problematic responses (bit.ly/35z56gh). As a service to the field, my colleagues and I also created a Shiny App that can automatically detect questionable responses in researchers’ data (Prims, Sisso, Bai, 2018). These efforts received considerable attention from researchers and the media, and ultimately, my work directly changed Mturk’s platform (i.e., its treatment of participants’ GPS coordinates data) as well as many researchers’ data collection practices.
Future Research
One of the key contributors to the decline of the White population is that more and more descendants of White people are identifying as multiracial due to the growing number of interracial marriages. How do people make sense of the multiracial population’s growth and potential replacement of distinct racial groups? Expanding my first and second lines of research, I will investigate this question from multiple angles, including factors related to the perceivers (e.g., their racial identity and ideology) as well as the perceived (e.g., the multiracial population’s racial phenotype and cultural beliefs). My future research will also investigate social changes beyond racial demographic shifts. For example, my ongoing research explores rapid shifts of cultural values in multicultural societies generally, the ideological clash between rival political groups, and the increasingly inevitable integration of artificial intelligence in our everyday life. I look forward to continuing this line of work as a faculty member at your university.
Expanding my third line of work, I will focus on leveraging novel technologies for impact-oriented research that will mobilize concrete social changes for good. For example, through decades of research, scientists have provided effective solutions to many social issues that have palpable and irreversible consequences (e.g., gun violence and climate change), but political divisions have hindered progress in implementing these solutions. In an ongoing project, I am using artificial intelligence to produce mass-customized persuasion content in real-time human-machine interactions. I am looking forward to testing this method’s efficacy and variations in my future research.
1. The Psychological Consequences of Social Change
One of the most remarkable social changes we are witnessing today is the increasingly diverse population in society. Demographically, the population growth of racial minorities and the population decline of White individuals are jointly contributing to the growing diversity. However, prior psychological research on population change almost exclusively focused on how the growth of minority populations triggers status threat concerns, overlooking the decline of the majority (White) population. In two papers (Bai, Federico 2019 GPIR; Bai & Federico, 2021 JESP), I show that White people are in fact more attuned to the population decline of their in-group than out-group, which can activate a collective existential threat and in turn trigger inimical consequences such as an increase in levels of racial prejudice and right-wing backlash.
This line of research also investigates how sociodemographic changes interact with the ideological beliefs of both perceivers and targets. For example, I demonstrated in two other papers that our evaluation of an emerging group is primarily determined by whether the group’s cultural values and ideological beliefs are similar to ours, showing that effects like these are further modulated by our own ideological beliefs (Bai, Federico, Simon, working paper; Bai, 2022 GPIR).
Collectively, the first line of my research contributes to the field by introducing a new understanding of how population change can translate into a seismic shift in public opinion. Furthermore, this work highlights the population decline of one’s in-group as an increasingly critical, yet overlooked, aspect of social change that has a distinct impact on contemporary political events.
2. The Critical Role of Ideological Beliefs in the Changing World
As society becomes more diverse, more political leaders are elected from different racial backgrounds. How do we evaluate them? Prior theories posit that people with racist views would support White candidates and oppose minority candidates. However, these theories fail to explain why prejudiced people still sometimes support minority political candidates, such as Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. To solve this puzzle, I proposed an alternative theory: people with racist views tend to support candidates who have conservative or pro-White policy preferences, and they do so regardless of whether the candidates themselves are White. To test my theory against prior theories, I conducted studies with over 40,000 participants using a variety of methods and samples (Bai, 2021 JPSP). I consistently show support for my theory over the prior ones: prejudiced citizens do support conservative candidates, even if the candidates are racial minorities, and in contrast, they oppose liberal candidates, even if the candidates are White.
In follow-up studies, I found that White Americans who have a strong White identity or a narcissistic view of Whiteness tend to support political candidates who also have conservative or pro-White beliefs, even if the candidates are Black, and the same pattern is found for people who have an implicit anti-Black bias (Bai, 2021 SPPS; Bai, working paper). On a theoretical level, these studies demonstrate that leaders’ beliefs often play a more important role in how they are evaluated than their demographic identities. Furthermore, my findings highlight a less visible mechanism of hierarchy preservation: people who are resistant to progressive social change may support minority leaders with hierarchy-preserving ideologies while disguising their prejudice as support for minority rights. This work has important implications for leadership selection. In addition to appointing minorities, diversity initiatives should consider whether the appointed leaders will advocate for minorities in the organization and society.
The Belief-Driven Model of Social Perception. An increasing number of people identify as multiracial. The growth of this population marks a distinct aspect of the growing diversity in society. Through interracial marriages, the multiracial population will eventually replace the distinct racial groups that we know today. Will our social perception of race adapt to these changes? In other words, will we still categorize multiracial people into one racial group versus another, and if so, how? This question is important because if we continue to see a race where there is none, racial biases will ironically outlive the existence of racial category boundaries themselves, and racism will persist in the “post-racial” world.
Building on my finding that a target political candidate’s beliefs can shape our support of them as a leader (Bai, 2021 JPSP), I conducted ten experiments (nine preregistered) to test whether a racially ambiguous target’s beliefs can shape how we perceive their race (Bai, working paper). My experiments show that people visually perceive a target with left-leaning views as darker than one with right-leaning views because they are more likely to identify the left-leaning target as Black. These results emerged not only in the U.S. but also in Mexico and South Africa, and the same pattern is observed among White and Black participants alike.
As more and more people overtly signal their political beliefs in everyday life, I will investigate the specific real-world consequences of this bias in my future research. For example, are people accessorized with liberal symbols more likely to be recognized as Black and, therefore, more likely to experience police brutality and racially motivated mass shootings based on aggressors' split-second perceptions? I am looking forward to answering these important questions in the coming years.
In short, the second line of my research highlights that our belief system plays an often-overlooked, yet critical, role in how we evaluate others in the ever-changing demographic landscape.
3. Interfacing Novel Methods, Techniques, and Technologies
Finally, as a researcher with a strongly empirical approach to theory building, I often engage with new methods and techniques. Sometimes, I invent new techniques and methods to address the challenges I encounter in pursuing my existing research questions. Other times, I leverage novel technologies to address and develop new research questions. Ultimately, this line of research complements my substantive lines of research by equipping me with more rigorous research methods.
For example, in political psychology, party identity and ideology are two of the most frequently studied variables, but their roles were often confounded in past research. To address this, I introduced the Multiple-Matching Perspective (Bai, 2022 PSPB), a novel method of studying correlated predictors that are nested within participants and the target that participants perceive. This method clarifies that many psychological variables can be nested within participants and targets—perceivers have a party identity and ideology, but the perceived target, such as political leaders, can also have a party identity and ideology. By considering these variables from both sides and how they are matched or moderated by each other, this method unveils the nuanced roles of each variable that have confounded past findings.
I have also advanced the field’s research practices concerning data quality issues. Much research in the socio-behavioral sciences relies on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) as a key source of data collection. In 2018, I discovered significant data quality issues on Mturk and soon introduced a method of using participants’ metadata (i.e., repetition of GPS coordinates) to detect problematic responses (bit.ly/35z56gh). As a service to the field, my colleagues and I also created a Shiny App that can automatically detect questionable responses in researchers’ data (Prims, Sisso, Bai, 2018). These efforts received considerable attention from researchers and the media, and ultimately, my work directly changed Mturk’s platform (i.e., its treatment of participants’ GPS coordinates data) as well as many researchers’ data collection practices.
Future Research
One of the key contributors to the decline of the White population is that more and more descendants of White people are identifying as multiracial due to the growing number of interracial marriages. How do people make sense of the multiracial population’s growth and potential replacement of distinct racial groups? Expanding my first and second lines of research, I will investigate this question from multiple angles, including factors related to the perceivers (e.g., their racial identity and ideology) as well as the perceived (e.g., the multiracial population’s racial phenotype and cultural beliefs). My future research will also investigate social changes beyond racial demographic shifts. For example, my ongoing research explores rapid shifts of cultural values in multicultural societies generally, the ideological clash between rival political groups, and the increasingly inevitable integration of artificial intelligence in our everyday life. I look forward to continuing this line of work as a faculty member at your university.
Expanding my third line of work, I will focus on leveraging novel technologies for impact-oriented research that will mobilize concrete social changes for good. For example, through decades of research, scientists have provided effective solutions to many social issues that have palpable and irreversible consequences (e.g., gun violence and climate change), but political divisions have hindered progress in implementing these solutions. In an ongoing project, I am using artificial intelligence to produce mass-customized persuasion content in real-time human-machine interactions. I am looking forward to testing this method’s efficacy and variations in my future research.
Contact
[email protected] (for all academic inquiries)
[email protected] (for all inquiries related to The Publish or Perish Game)
[email protected] (for all other inquiries)
At the moment Max is unable to take on new requests for peer-reviewing manuscripts, unfortunately.
[email protected] (for all academic inquiries)
[email protected] (for all inquiries related to The Publish or Perish Game)
[email protected] (for all other inquiries)
At the moment Max is unable to take on new requests for peer-reviewing manuscripts, unfortunately.