![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/HappyWorkplace.jpg\" "\\"diverse\\"")
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Diversity has become a goal for all sorts of institutions\u2014but what it means may depend on who you ask<\/strong>. A new study published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the\u00a0Association for Psychological Science, finds that people\u2019s ideologies help determine what they count as \u201cdiverse.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Miguel Unzueta, the study\u2019s lead author, notes that \u201cdiversity\u201d historically meant inclusiveness toward historically disadvantaged groups. Now, however, the term is commonly used to refer to people who are different in any way (even personality traits and food preferences)\u2014and that, Dr. Unzueta argues, may be making the concept useless. Dr. Unzueta saw this play out first hand at the universities he was part of and the organizations he studied. \u201cIt seemed like everyone was very comfortable talking about diversity, but not really race and gender,\u201d says Unzueta, of the Anderson School of Management and University of California, Los Angeles, who co-wrote the paper with Eric Knowles of the University of California, Irvine, and Geoffrey Ho of UCLA. \u201cThe problem is, we could all be talking about diversity and we could all mean different things. It\u2019s a very abstract, euphemistic catch-all.\u201d<\/p>\n Unzueta and his colleagues designed an experiment to look at how people think about diversity. They recruited 300 people, mostly students and staff members at UCLA, to take an online survey. Each person saw a profile of a company, showing how many people there were of four different racial groups and four different occupations. Different people saw different combinations, such as low racial diversity and low occupational diversity (mostly white and mostly engineers), low racial diversity but high occupational diversity, and so on. Then they were asked if the company was \u201cdiverse\u201d or not.<\/p>\n How people responded depended on their ideology, particularly something called \u201csocial dominance orientation.\u201d<\/strong> This is a basic motivation to either maintain the status quo or decrease inequality. People who score high in social dominance orientation are less egalitarian. When these people saw a company that was mostly white, but had fairly even numbers of engineers, accountants, consultants, and marketers, they declared it to be diverse. In the next phase of questions, they also said the company didn\u2019t need affirmative action policies to improve its racial diversity. \u201cBy calling the company diverse, that allows them to oppose race-based affirmative action,\u201d Unzueta says. People with low social dominance orientation thought occupationally unbalanced companies lacked diversity\u2014even if the company had high racial diversity.\u00a0 This allowed egalitarian-minded people to legitimize support for race-based affirmative action policies since the organization in question was seen as lacking diversity. Thus, across the range of social dominance orientation, people leveraged demographic ambiguity in ways that justified their preexisting policy preferences.<\/p>\n It\u2019s clear that some people thought having a roughly equivalent number of engineers, accountants, consultants, and marketers made a company \u201cdiverse.\u201d That has nothing to do with what \u201cdiversity\u201d was originally used to describe, and accountants aren\u2019t a group that needs policies to make up for historical disadvantages. \u201cOne thing I hope this work is starting to make clear is that to talk about issues of fairness, social justice, and group-based equality, we can\u2019t be using euphemisms,\u201d Unzueta says. \u201cIf a company really does want to have a racially diverse workforce, talk about race. Don\u2019t hide behind diversity.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Diversity has become a goal for all sorts of institutions\u2014but what it means may depend on who you ask. A new study… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[12,102],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1659,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}