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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Description
The 2016 election brought to light a political climate change in the United States and showed that questions scholars and pundits alike thought were answered perhaps had not been completely addressed. For some, the main question left unanswered was what would it take for a woman to become President of the United States? For others, the question of fear politics and the effects of social media were raised. Perhaps, the most intriguing was exactly who has influence over US elections? While these, and other, questions were asked in the context of the presidential election, they are also applicable to all political races. This dissertation examines how voter perceptions based on stereotypes and racial threat can affect Latina candidates’ prospects for election. Using an online experiment with 660 subjects and two elite interviews to test four hypotheses in order to determine whether or not racial resentment and stereotypes play a role in voter perceptions of Latina political candidates. The results show that racial resent and gender stereotypes play a role in voter perception of Latina political candidates. The results have theoretical and practical implications.
ContributorsHernandez, Samantha L. (Author) / Herrera, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Navarro, Sharon (Committee member) / Magaña, Lisa (Committee member) / Hoekstra, Valerie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Social categories such as race and gender are associated by people with certain characteristics (e.g. males are angry), which unconsciously affects how people evaluate and react to a person of specific social categories. This phenomenon, referred to as implicit bias, has been the interest of many social psychologists. However, the implicit bias research has been focusing on only one social category at a time, despite humans being entities of multiple social categories. The research also neglects the behavioral contexts in which implicit biases are triggered and rely on a broad definition for the locus of the bias regulation mechanism. These limitations raise questions on whether the current bias reduction strategies are effective. The current dissertation sought to address these limitations by introducing an ecologically valid and multidimensional method. In Chapters 1 and 2, the mouse-tracking task was integrated into the implicit association task to examine how implicit biases were moderated in different behavioral contexts. The results demonstrated that the manifestation of implicit biases depended on the behavioral context as well as the distinctive identity created by the combinations of different social categories. Chapter 3 laid groundwork for testing working memory as the processing capacity for the bias regulation mechanism. The result suggested that the hand-motion tracking indices of working memory load could be used to infer the capacity of an individual to suppress the influence of implicit bias. In Chapter 4, the mouse-tracking paradigm was integrated into the Stroop task with implicit associations serving as the Stroop targets. The implicit associations produced various effects including the conflict adaptation effect, like the Stroop targets, which suggested that implicit associations and Stroop stimuli are handled by overlapping cognitive mechanisms. Throughout these efforts, the current dissertation, first, demonstrated that a more ecologically valid and multidimensional approach is required to understand biased behaviors in detail. Furthermore, the current dissertation suggested the cognitive control mechanism as a finer definition for the locus of the bias regulation mechanism, which could be leveraged to offer solutions that are more adaptive and effective in the environment where collaboration and harmony are more important than ever.
ContributorsRheem, Hansol (Author) / Becker, D. Vaughn (Thesis advisor) / Craig, Scotty D. (Committee member) / Gutzwiller, Robert S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019