Writing the literature review is not a neutral act. In fact, the key central aim of consolidating work in a particular research area is to d
Abstract
Writing the literature review is not a neutral act. In fact, the key central aim of consolidating work in a particular research area is to demonstrate one’s knowledge of this area; that is, one must know the ‘conversations’ concerning the research topic. Literature review becomes violent in the Bourdieusian sense because it imposes particular configurations of privileged knowledge on researchers. Thus, in this paper, we argue that literature review is an enactment of symbolic violence and, in the process, epistemic theft, and central to this practice is the construction of research questions. Literature review, as a site of scholarly conversations, dictates the kinds of questions we ask, thus unwittingly framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies. By asking a different set of questions, ‘new’ or different understandings about certain social phenomena may emerge.
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"Our made up bullshit doesn't withstand examination unless you look at it the way we want you to look at it."
A landmark study that claimed men enjoy an unfair advantage in scientific careers has been seriously challenged: a nearly identical rerun of the experiment has found that the opposite is true.
The results are all the more striking because a leading scientific journal had refused to repeat the original experiment, raising concerns that some researchers are reluctant to scrutinise results that align with their views.
The original study, published in 2012, has been cited 4,600 times — an enormous figure in a field where most papers attract fewer than 20 citations. It involved science professors being sent a fictional CV for a lab manager job.
In half of CVs, the applicant was named “John”, while for the other half the applicant was named “Jennifer”. Everything else, from the candidate’s academic grades to work experience, was identical.
The professors who saw the male name rated him as more competent, more hireable and more deserving of mentoring and a higher salary. The finding is often mentioned in debates about the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) careers.
The new paper repeated the test on a far larger scale. Whereas the original had asked about 130 academics at six universities, the authors of the new paper — led by Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim of Rutgers University in New Jersey — contacted nearly 1,300 professors from more than 50 American research institutions, using the same application materials and the same measures of perceived competence, hireability, likeability and salary recommendations.
The aim was to see whether the result of the original paper held when the experiment was repeated. It did not. The female applicant was seen as marginally more capable and appealing to work with and the more hireable of the pair. She was also seen as worth a bigger salary — $35,550 versus $34,150 for the man. The differences were small, but consistent. The widely cited bias against women failed to reappear; it now tilted the other way.
According to the authors of the new study, the resistance they encountered when they suggested repeating the experiment may be as telling as the result. Honeycutt said that he and his co-authors were taken aback when they proposed a rerun to Nature Human Behaviour, a leading journal.
When Honeycutt and his colleagues submitted a registered replication report (RRR) — a formal proposal to repeat the study — it was rejected by a panel of peer reviewers acting for the journal.
Honeycutt said his impression was that the reviewers approved of the original findings and feared they might not hold up. “We can’t know for certain — but [that is our suspicion] given just the nature of their feedback and pushback,” he said.
Writing on the Substack website, Jussim added: “If reviewers like [a study] and its results and they anticipate it won’t replicate, they can concoct serious scientific-sounding reasons to reject the RRR. Which … is exactly what happened at [Nature Human Behaviour].” He argued that the process reflected “a profoundly antiscientific attitude”.
One objection raised by the reviewers was that professors might already know about the original 2012 paper and would therefore give “tainted” responses. Honeycutt and Jussim proposed a solution: they would ask participants if they were familiar with the earlier study and analyse the data accordingly. The suggestion was dismissed.
Jussim later wrote that the reviewers’ objections in effect meant the original study “could never be replicated”, implying its conclusions “must stand intact, for ever”.
His team took the project elsewhere, preregistered their methods and ran the work regardless. Most professors, it turned out, had not heard of the 2012 paper. Their results have now been accepted by the journal Meta-Psychology.
How far the new results reflect the wider state of equality in science is debatable. Women earn about half of all doctorates in the life sciences and a growing share in fields such as chemistry and engineering. However, they remain in the minority in senior academic posts. In Britain, only about a quarter of professors in Stem are women. The study looked only at one type of relatively junior job, that of a laboratory manager.
Erika Pastrana, vice-president of the Nature Research Journals portfolio, said: “Decisions by our editors to accept or reject replication studies are based solely on whether the research meets our editorial criteria, including standards for methodological rigour. They are not influenced by whether the original study’s conclusions may or may not be replicated. Our decisions are not driven by a preferred narrative.”
She added: “We do not agree that a study becomes immune to scrutiny if exact replication is difficult or not pursued. Scientific scrutiny occurs through many mechanisms, including replication, critical commentary, meta-analyses, methodological debate, and new research that builds on or challenges prior work.”
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Are STEM Faculty Biased Against Female Applicants? A Robust Replication and Extension of Moss-Racusin and Colleagues (2012)
Abstract
In a seminal study investigating gender bias in academic science, Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) found bias against female lab manager applicants with respect to competence, hireability, mentoring, and salary conferral. This topic was revisited here as a registered replication report with four studies—one direct replication, two direct replications with extensions, and a meta-analysis. The present set of studies, all using the same methods and materials as the original, sampled from a larger and broader pool of faculty than did the original, collectively reflecting the breadth of STEM disciplines at R1 universities across the United States. The reported studies all had higher power to detect smaller effect sizes than in the original. Across these studies, Moss-Racusin et al.’s (2012) findings failed to replicate, and biases were consistently in the opposite direction—favoring female over male applicants (albeit with smaller effect sizes). We discuss the implications of these findings for the broader literature on gender bias in science and its implications for the scientific workforce.
This is a guest post by Jake Mackey, a professor of classics at a liberal arts college in California and co-founder of Free Black Thought. He has two prior guest posts here: Living by virtuous lies: On the "racism" of the SAT and White Doctors Kill Black Babies: Dubious Science and Anti-Racist Medicine (co-authored with David Gilbert).
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[ Depicts a scene from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials, but widely acknowledged as a metaphor for 1950s McCarthyism. Giles was accused of witchcraft but refused to plead either guilty or not guilty because his heirs could then be deprived of his considerable estate. As Giley is being pressed by the weight of massive stones, he is repeatedly urged to enter a plea. His response: “More weight.” It eventually killed him. Amusing side note, Lee writing here. I played Giles Corey in my high school play. ]
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I am 53 years old. The last four years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I've ever lived through.
By: Jake Mackey
Published: Dec 18, 2024
Noam Dworman, host of the Comedy Cellar Podcast, put it this way:
If—
“the general atmosphere of fear that we lived through as people who want to speak and live our lives freely—if all that change in American society had the fingerprints on it of a particular leader, that leader would be a fascist. If any leader had brought that change into our lives, that would be the most fascist experience with a leader we have ever seen in this country.”
But the author of all this change was not a particular leader. It was the left.
It was a society-wide culture of left-authoritarian intolerance, not a fascist leader, that made me watch my words like a hawk in my classroom for half a decade.
It was fear of retaliation from the left, not from a fascist leader, that caused me to lay awake at night on more occasions than I can count, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancelation campaign against me.
It was not a fascist leader but fear of intolerant leftists among my colleagues that made me censor myself, as a yet-untenured faculty member, when I was asked to report on my findings about the efficacy—which is nil or worse—of diversity training. It was fear of my leftist colleagues that made me bite my tongue and not speak out when I was asked to sign a statement containing a defamatory lie about a student who had in fact made hateful comments about Asians in a private text message, but had not, as we were asked to affirm with our signatures, threatened violence. (I did not sign, but shamefully I did not defend this vulnerable 19-year-old against faculty lies.)
It was not a fascist leader but fear of a pile-on from the left that compelled a colleague and me to humble ourselves before 18-year-olds with a public apology when a small group of students held our jointly taught class hostage for 30 minutes, tearfully accusing us of traumatizing them by showing a brief scene from a film about war, The Thin Red Line, in order to illustrate a point that St. Augustine makes in his Confessions about the evil in the human heart.
We later learned that the majority of the students had disagreed with their peers’ performative accusation of “harm” and had resented their hijacking of the class with transparently nonsensical accusations. However, the sensible majority of students were as terrified of their peers as we were, and of their peers’ capacity to destroy them for even imaginary infractions, and so they had held their tongues as the grotesque event unfolded. (Worth noting here: I think the vast majority of students, and faculty and administrators, too, are reasonable people who were intimidated into silence by socially distributed authoritarianism, just as I was, over the past years. More on this dynamic below.)
Nor were my colleague and I unique among faculty on my campus. No, it was not a fascist leader but fear of attack from the grassroots left that generated countless whispers among faculty in the halls of my college and others. Professors were afraid to tell any but their most trusted colleagues about how students had stood up in class to denounce them for ideological apostasy or to accuse them of "traumatizing" or "harming" them by teaching basic scientific facts. Professors were afraid to show a “triggering” image, or to fail to teach a given subject from the now-mandatory ideological perspective of Afropessimism. Professors were afraid to teach historical or literary material, unobjectionable until seemingly just the week before, that was now deemed inherently "white supremacist."
[ Maoist public shaming ]
It was not a fascist leader but a merciless socially distributed grassroots left-authoritarianism that led a senior administrator, a black man, to remark to a small group of us whom he trusted—
“I live in fear that if I say one wrong word, it will be the end of a 30-year career. I worry that I can’t protect my staff if any of them says one wrong word.”
It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of retribution enacted by 18-year-olds—before which a department chair, tenured faculty, and college administrators cowered and averted their eyes—that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud the name of a character in an antiracist comic book. Yes, it was a classroom of first-year students—acting with the tacit complicity of an entire college staffed by cowards (whose cowardice was nonetheless rational)—that ended her career for reading a name in a comic book whose entire lesson centered on the evils of racism. They denounced her as a white supremacist in a way that her fledgling career as a professor, which had begun only one semester before, could never recover from.
Off campus, I know an artist whose career and business a left-authoritarian mob, not a fascist leader, attempted to destroy because he did not post a black square, signaling solidarity with BLM, on his company’s social media in 2020.
I know a musician who lost his band and music career merely for revealing that he was reading a book that had been effectively "banned" by a censorious left. His experience of repressive, totalitarian retribution came not from a fascist leader, but from a faceless, intolerant mob.
[ Nazi book burning ]
It was not a fascist leader but fear of a cancelation campaign from the left—as well as fear that many of my colleagues and college administrators would tacitly endorse the campaign out of their own fear of defending me—that led me to issue a groveling apology to a small group of students and faculty for bringing this same musician to my campus, along with Daryl Davis, a musician and anti-Klan activist who has done more to combat the most virulent forms of antiblack racism in America than perhaps anyone since the Civil Rights era, as part of a Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) panel discussion.
[ Lee here. Daryl Davis has, miraculously, by befriending them, gotten over 200 members of the KKK to abandon the group. When they do so, they donate their KKK robes & hoods to him, which he keeps as a kind of trophy. I really wanted to post an image of him with a reformed KKK member in full garb, but because of the very reasons outlined in Jake’s essay, I decided against it. You can follow Daryl on X (formerly Twitter) here and see for yourself; he posts those images regularly. ]
The two musicians got into a spirited but friendly disagreement about the value of BLM’s approach during the FAIR panel discussion. Afterwards, I heard from a senior colleague that some students and faculty who had been peripherally involved with bringing the panel to campus were mortified that their names might be associated with an event in which someone had said something critical of BLM, and that I would do well to issue an apology. Perhaps these students and faculty really could not countenance hearing criticism of BLM. More likely, I suspect, they were motivated by the same terror of cancelation and ostracism that I was. If their peers learned that they had had anything to do with a panel on which BLM was criticized by one of the speakers, they could face social or professional death on our small campus.
I have read of accomplished leaders in the world of arts and literature who lost their positions not because they criticized BLM but because the statement of solidarity with BLM that they published was not strident enough. I have read (and written) of physicians who lost important positions, were subjected to star chamber proceedings, and whose words were scrubbed from the internet merely for suggesting that socioeconomic conditions and not the unscientific construct of "implicit bias" were responsible for racial health disparities.
I have read of a liberal, gay Canadian educator, who had served children selflessly for decades, who was quite plausibly driven to suicide after being derided as a racist in front of an audience of 200 of his peers by a DEI trainer in a COVID-era “diversity” Zoom call.
And I could go on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And I still wouldn’t have broached the repressiveness of our response to COVID, in which the government was involved, occasionally recruiting private citizens as instruments of repression!
Socially Distributed Authoritarianism: No Fascist Leader Needed
None of this repressiveness, this authoritarian intolerance, this insistence that only a single view was acceptable on pain of professional and social destruction—along with the fear that it all generated—was imposed by a fascist leader. No, it was imposed through the distributed channels of a small number of individual agents converging on an ideology that the vast majority of Americans found absurd, and on a set of repressive practices to enforce it on an unwilling populace. It was also imposed—and this is crucial—by the vast majority of individuals and institutions whose rationally self-interested fear of being subjected to these repressive practices made them turn their eyes away, allowing it to happen to those around them and tacitly endorsing it.
And I cannot but include myself in this indictment. So many of us, myself included, behaved like latter-day Peters, thrice denying the Jesuses of our colleagues, friends, and family in order to save our own skins by falsifying all our most dearly held preferences. My own cowardly failure, before 2022, when at last I got tenure and achieved a measure of security, to come to the aid of friends who were being unfairly scapegoated and professionally destroyed will forever be a source of shame for me.
John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty, noted that in cases such as I have described here, “society is itself the tyrant—society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it.” A collective tyrant of this sort—
practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
The risk of lapsing into a “social tyranny,” Mill believed, warranted a kind of prophylaxis that even measures like the First Amendment cannot provide—
Protection…against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.
The Tyranny of the Minority and the Spiral of Silence
Mill, it must be noted, is describing here a “tyranny of the majority,” whereas the “woke” social tyranny we have lately lived through and of which we are perhaps now breaking free may better be seen as a “tyranny of the minority.”
The economist Glenn Loury—writing in the Journal of Free Black Thought, the periodical of an organization some friends and I founded in 2020 to fight burgeoning woke racism and the tacit suppression in our public discourse of black viewpoint diversity—describes how a minority can exert tyrannical power over a majority:
German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined a term that describes this phenomenon: the “Spiral of Silence.” In a spiral of silence, when holding a certain view entails a stigma, then, for fear of being seen as having that view, most people stay silent. Thus, the masses believe they are alone or in a small minority of people with the stigmatized view, when in fact they are indeed in the majority, one of the masses.
In progressive-controlled areas of our society today, we are suffering from a spiral of silence…. [...] Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence.
The spiral of silence, with its “voluntary limitation of one’s own speech,” is the dynamic by means of which a “woke” tiny minority (estimated to constitute a mere 8% of the population) succeeded in enforcing the social tyranny of the past few years.
Crucially, for the majority of us to have stayed silent all this time, we had to submit ourselves to self-surveillance and self-censorship. The terrorizing spectacle of sudden, arbitrary cancelations, played out on the internet and on campuses, served a panopticon-like function, assuring us that we are always being watched, always subject to discipline. As Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it”—
assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.
Over the last few years, there was no need for a state apparatus of totalitarian control. Instead, each of us internalized the constraints on our speech and behavior that the “woke” wished to impose. Knowing that our own social media posts and others’ smartphone video recordings of us were always being uploaded to the “non-corporal” cloud, and in fear of personal and professional destruction, we self-monitored and self-regulated ourselves into a spiral of silence that left only extreme voices free to fill the void, until it came to seem like those were the only voices that had ever sounded.
Now, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there was an entire class of people who genuinely never entered a spiral of silence, who never felt the need to falsify their preferences, who never experienced so much as a moment of fear of their neighbors, students, colleagues, or acquaintances, who sincerely never were discomfited by episodes of mob-led retribution and cancelation such as I've described here. My theory is that (1) some of these were people who worked and lived in places and occupations blessedly removed from the haunts of the knowledge-economy elites who spearhead “social justice” persecutions, so they simply didn’t encounter the phenomenon; (2) some of these were people who observed somewhat ruefully what was happening to their friends, colleagues, and neighbors, and felt, with a sigh, that it was unfortunate, but rationalized it as a few eggs getting broken in order to make a beautiful omelet of social justice; and finally (3) some of these were people whose own ideology so effortlessly mirrored that of the dominant social configuration that they simply never experienced a moment of cognitive friction.
This latter group comprises the “woke,” whether narcissistic, sadistic, witch-hunting activists or merely complacent fellow travelers. I would posit that many people in this “woke” group have not, for the most part, antecedently and independently arrived at "woke" ideology on their own. The true fire of conversion and fanaticism burns in only a rare few. Rather, for most wokists, their minds are such as to spontaneously and uncritically conform themselves to whatever virtuous lie we are collectively supposed to believe or endorse in any given week—from abolishing slave-patrol policing in America, to mass graves of Indians in Canada, to human biology having no bearing on a person's sex or gender. This group has been, and appears to remain, in the grip of an ongoing mass delusion.
Moreover, this group is by and large the class of people that I fully expect to tell me in the comments that none of this ever happened or that I have fallen for a right-wing lie. Some of these people will also make a faulty inference from this essay and assume that I am a hardcore right-winger. In a classic case of the whataboutism fallacy, they will ask, Well, what about the Republicans?, and they'll accuse me of carrying water for a right wing that is supposedly far more repressive than any leftist or Democrat could ever aspire to be.
Even more incoherently, some people from this group will say that my supposed experience of intolerance (which they doubt ever really happened) is in any event exactly what a bigot should expect (and therefore it’s good that it happened). If I have views that it was impossible for me to express on campus over the past years, that is just and good, for their very rejection entails that my views must have been beyond the pale, and no campus is obliged to platform or tolerate Nazis and their ilk. On this view, people like those whose destruction I have chronicled here merely met with a social opprobrium that was symmetrical with their sins. Case closed.
These inferences and accusations are, of course, not only false but also logically fallacious, even if—alas—it has not been uncommon to hear them over the past 4 and more years. The simple truth is that I can be angry about left-wing repressiveness and still be plenty alarmed by right-wing repressiveness, as indeed I am. I have spoken out on Twitter/X against Florida's repression of speech, for example, and against the crushing of pro-Palestinian speech on some campuses, and just recently I shared my fear, which I think is not unfounded, that Trump may end up invoking the Insurrection Act.
Be all that as it may, there is simply no equivalency between the impact on my "lived experience" of the daily, grinding paranoia and fear that the leftist culture of repression and bullying has created in me and that I have seen it create in students and colleagues, and my more abstract and theoretical concerns about a repressive right, that is in any event far more distant from me because I am not obliged to go to or work in Florida or Texas. In contrast, the society-wide leftist culture of authoritarian tyranny that I have described here has been more or less ubiquitous.
I’m well aware that “wokeness” and its associated “cancel culture” kicked off in the 2010s and began to get really bad ten years ago, around 2015, but I have spoken here only of my own personal experience, which became untenable shortly before 2020.
Moreover, I am well aware that the excesses of the totalitarian left of the last few years can’t compete with the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or Stalinism, or theocratic Islamism (all three of which, by the way, are embraced to one degree or another by the left). Accordingly, I have used “totalitarian” here not in its proper sense, as a system of authoritarian government, but in an extended sense, as a socially enforced leftwing regime of authoritarianism, an attempt by a vocal minority to exert total control over thoughts, speech, and action. The fact that the abuses perpetrated by American leftists against their freedom-loving fellow citizens over the last few years were not acts of a totalitarian government hardly entails that the era was some sort of picnic, and it is telling that people who grew up in totalitarian regimes have seen echoes of what they escaped in the “woke” regime.
Feel free to deny my account of the last 4 years, but I refuse to be gaslit about what I have experienced and seen.
I close with a parting shot from Nevline Nnaji, whose work we have shared and promoted in the Journal of Free Black Thought:
Both the New York Times and Bloomberg prepared stories on the study’s findings, but axed them just before publication.
By: Abigail Anthony
Published: Nov 25, 2024
A new study found that diversity, equity, and inclusion materials have a wide range of negative consequences, including psychological harm, increased hostility, and greater agreement with extreme authoritarian rhetoric, such as adapted Adolf Hitler quotes.
Both the New York Times and Bloomberg were preparing stories on the findings, but axed them just before publication citing editorial decisions.
The Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released the study “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias” on Monday. The study examined whether the themes and materials common in DEI trainings foster inclusion or exacerbate conflicts, and whether such materials promote empathy or increase hostility towards groups labeled as oppressors. The study consisted of three experiments — one focusing on race, one on religion, and the last on caste.
Although proponents of DEI trainings claim that they are designed to educate individuals about biases and reduce discrimination, the study found that participants primed with DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators. In one experiment, the DEI materials made people more willing to agree with Hitler quotes that substituted “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the highest caste in the Indian caste system.
“Participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” the study reads. “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”
In the experiment focused on race, the researchers randomly assigned 423 Rutgers University undergraduates into two groups: one control group exposed to a neutral essay about U.S. corn production, and the other exposed to an essay that combined material from Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. After exposure to either text, participants were presented with the following race-neutral scenario: “A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”
The results showed that participants primed with Kendi and DiAngelo materials perceived more discrimination from the admissions officer, despite the absence of any racial identification and evidence of discrimination. Those participants also believed that the admissions officer was more unfair to the applicant, had caused more harm to the applicant, and had committed more “microaggressions.”
In addition to imputing bias without evidence, the participants who read Kendi and DiAngelo were 12 percent more willing to support suspending the admission officer for a semester, 16 percent more willing to demand a public apology to the applicant, and 12 percent more willing to require additional DEI training to correct the officer compared to participants in the control group.
“Educational materials from some of the most well-published and well-known DEI scholars not only failed to positively enhance interracial attitudes, they provoked baseless suspicion and encouraged punitive attitudes,” the study states.
Lee Jussim, a professor at Rutgers University and one of the study’s authors, told National Review, said researchers purposely built some ambiguity into the scenarios.
“In social psychology, we purposely study situations that have some ambiguity in order to evaluate whether and when people’s biases influence their judgments of those situations,” he said.
In the experiment on anti-Islamophobia trainings, the researchers presented over 2,000 participants with either the essay about corn or content drawn from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding organization that addresses Islamophobia. The participants were then presented with a scenario involving two hypothetical individuals, Ahmed Akhtar and George Green, who were both convicted of identical terrorism charges for bombing a local government building.
The participants exposed to the corn essay perceived Akhtar and Green’s trials as equally fair and did not indicate any perception of Islamophobia. However, those exposed to anti-Islamophobia training materials rated Akhtar’s trial significantly less fair.
“These results suggest that anti-Islamophobia training inspired by ISPU materials may cause individuals to assume unfair treatment of Muslim people, even when no evidence of bias or unfairness is present,” the study states. “This effect highlights a broader issue: DEI narratives that focus heavily on victimization and systemic oppression can foster unwarranted distrust and suspicions of institutions and alter subjective assessments of events.”
The third experiment about caste involved nearly 850 participants and used materials developed by Equality Labs, a self-described “South Asian feminist organization” that works to “end caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, and religious intolerance.”
Participants were exposed to either caste-sensitivity-training material from Equality Labs or an academic essay about caste, then were presented the following scenario: “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.” (The names were reversed between respondents to avoid the possibility that the results reflected inferences drawn from the names themselves.)
“Rather than using a purely neutral control like the corn essay, we had a more historically accurate and less politically charged, less accusatory, control essay on caste to see if we still see pernicious effects of the DEI training,” Jussim said. “And the answer is yes.”
Compared to the group that read the neutral academic essay, the participants who were exposed to the DEI materials had a significantly higher perception of “microaggressions,” perceived harm, and assumptions of bias. Additionally, those who read the DEI materials showed a higher willingness to punish the admissions officer and assessed Hindus as more racist.
In the caste experiment, participants were interviewed and asked to rate the accuracy of the following Hitler quotes that replaced “Jew” with “Brahmin”: 1) “The Brahmin was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples. . . The Brahmins are a people under whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is suffering,” 2) “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Brahmin,” and 3) “Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one virus: the Brahmin! We will get well when we eliminate the Brahmin.”
Compared to the control group, the participants primed with DEI content had more than a 35 percent increase agreeing with the “parasite” statement, a 27 percent increase in agreeing with the “devil personified” statement, and a 33 percent increase in agreeing with the “virus” statement.
The researchers concluded from the three experiments that DEI materials can “engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment.”
“This research raises critical questions about how many individuals, as a result of these programs, have experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment,” the report reads.
The study was set to be covered by Bloomberg and the New York Times, although both publications axed their articles just before publication, according to communications reviewed by National Review.
“Unfortunately, both publications jumped on the story enthusiastically only for it to be inexplicably pulled at the highest editorial levels,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “This has never happened to the NCRI in its 5 year history.”
Two reporters at Bloomberg had agreed to cover the study and wrote an article. One of the journalists had described the coverage as “an important story” in communications with the NCRI and expressed being “eager” to publish the article; that journalist had further stated on November 11 that the article should be published in the next few days.
However, an editor — Nabila Ahmed, the team leader for Global Equality at Bloomberg News who “lead[s] a global team of reporters focused on stories that elevate issues of race, gender, diversity and fairness within companies, governments and societies” — informed the NCRI on November 15 that Bloomberg would not go forward with the article.
The NCRI asked for either a scientific or journalistic explanation, and Ahmed directed the researchers to Anna Kitanaka, the executive editor of Bloomberg Equality. Kitanaka told the NCRI that what stories get published and when is entirely an “editorial decision,” and did not provide details on why the publication axed the article.
A New York Times reporter told the NCRI that he would cover the new study on DEI materials, and further told the institute that an article was prepared to run on either October 14 or 15.
However, on October 12, he told an NCRI researcher that the Times would “hold off” on covering the study on DEI due to “some concerns,” and suggested that the publication would revisit the study if it underwent the academic peer-review process.
Although the reporter disclosed that he did not have “any concerns about the methodology” and that someone at the Times’ “data-driven reporting team” had “no problems” with the study, he stated that he had concluded the study wasn’t strong enough after speaking with an editor.
“The piece was reported and ready for publication, but at the eleventh hour, the New York Times insisted the research undergo peer review after discussions with editorial staff — an unprecedented demand for our work,” an NCRI researcher told National Review. “The journalist involved had previously covered far more sensitive NCRI findings, such as our QAnon and January 6th studies, without any such request.” (The New York Times wrote to National Review and denied that the story was “ready for publication.”)
The Times reporter suggested that the research wasn’t strong enough.
“I told my editor I thought if we were going to write a story casting serious doubts on the efficacy of the work of two of the country’s most prominent DEI scholars, the case against them has to be as strong as possible,” he wrote to the NCRI.
“Our journalists are always considering potential topics for news coverage, evaluating them for newsworthiness, and often choose not to pursue further reporting for a variety of reasons,” a spokesperson for the New York Times told National Review. “Speculative claims from outside parties about The Times’s editorial process are just that.”
National Review has reached out to Ahmed and Kitanaka with Bloomberg but has not yet received a response.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated with comments from the New York Times.
[ Via: https://archive.today/Y4pvU ]
==
It's not the normies who have been radicalized, it's the woke.
The idea that Claudine Gay was treated differently than other university presidents because of her skin color is not entirely untrue. Just not the way activists are trying to pretend.
If Claudine lived in "an anti-black world," she would have been ousted before Liz Magill. For that matter, she never would have been gently elevated the university presidency in spite of a weak - and as it turns out, fraudulent - academic history.
Have you noticed that the tactics and behaviors of activists mirror those of coercive controlling abusers?
Either Harvard's board hired someone for their top-most position without actually checking their academic credentials, or worse, did check, but hid it and proceeded anyway. Both roads lead to diversity hire.
Limitations in implicit bias research aren't always communicated to the public.
By: Lee Jussim
Published: Mar 28, 2022
KEY POINTS
There is no consensually-agreed upon definition of implicit bias. This makes communicating about implicit bias quite difficult.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common method for measuring implicit bias. Yet it has several flaws and limitations.
Those limitations, which are well-known among psychological scientists, are rarely acknowledged to the wider public, including students.
Implicit bias is in the air. Hillary Clinton famously declared that "implicit bias is a problem for everyone." When she was California Attorney General, now-Vice President Kamala Harris expanded implicit bias trainings for police and has attributed many things to implicit biases on her Twitter feed.
Given widespread distress over unconscious racism, many consulting firms now provide implicit bias trainings and assure you that they deliver. A simple Google search for "consultant, implicit bias training" yields pages and pages of hits. Is this kind of corporate response to the problem of implicit bias justified?
In a 2018 essay, West Virginia University sociologist Jason Manning argued that "unconscious racism" bears a resemblance to older superstitions about the evil eye and sympathetic magic—but rather than mysterious unseen supernatural forces, we have mysterious unseen unconscious forces. There are, of course, some differences between beliefs in the evil eye and unconscious racism. There is no evidence that people can harm you by looking at you, whereas there is a wealth of studies on implicit social cognition. But I argue that the comparison may still be justified because the evidence for unconscious racism is so weak.
A moral panic occurs when some substantial portion of a society creates a "folk devil"—members of the community considered deviant and dangerous—and exaggerates the dangers they pose. In one research report, for example, people massively overestimated the number of unarmed Black people killed by police in 2019, with more than half of all liberals surveyed estimating the number at 1,000 or more (when data indicated it was more likely to be around 27). And many people have been denounced or socially ostracized for opposing things like affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, even though the majority of Americans, including majorities of Black and Hispanic respondents, oppose basing college admissions or hiring on ethnicity or race.
Others have been denounced or publicly shamed for a maladroit compliment of a supermodel or for sharing a peer reviewed sociology article, if doing so is viewed as deviant behavior or contrary to widely-held views. I personally have witnessed a talk in which a Jewish professor was publicly called a "grotesque Nazi" by physics professors for having described Obama as "half-black" (he has a Kenyan father and a White American mother). Such responses can be seen as evidence of a moral panic and the creation of "folk devils" surrounding the topic of racism.
Returning, however, to the implicit bias consulting firms—it's possible to find powerful testaments to the effectiveness of their trainings. But what does the science actually say—not just about the trainings, but about implicit bias more generally?
The workhorse method for assessing implicit bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can take several of these here to see what they are like for yourself. But before you do, you should consider these reasons to be skeptical about any claims about implicit bias.
1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.
Several researchers in this domain have put together this repository of over 40 articles (and growing) identifying flaws, artifacts, limitations, and threats to the validity of the IAT. Here are the titles of just a few of those articles:
"More Error than Attitude in Implicit Association Tests"
"Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure"
"Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research"
In fairness, there are still plenty of research articles that take implicit bias seriously, such as this one. The point is not that the notion has been completely debunked or the IAT shown to be completely worthless; I even do research using the IAT! Instead, the point is that most of the most dramatic claims about it have been debunked or, at least, shown to be dubious and scientifically controversial. These are not firm grounds on which to sell the public on the power and prevalence of unconscious racism or trainings to mitigate it.
2. There is no consensually-accepted scientific definition of implicit bias.
Across five articles, there might be three with different definitions and two that do not even provide a definition. No one knows what "implicit bias" even is—at least if "know" is taken to mean "a clear understanding shared by most scientists."
3. The IAT measures reaction times, not things that most people think of as bias.
Whether reaction times might be considered bias in some technical sense is beyond the scope of this essay. Reaction times are not what most people think of when they think about bias; the IAT does not directly measure racism, oppression, or unfairness. (Whether it does so indirectly with any reasonable success is controversial, as described next.) To claim reaction times constitute any sort of bias in the common understanding of the meaning of "bias" is to import a conclusion by fiat rather than evidence.
4. At best, the IAT measures the strength of association of concepts in memory.
When reaction times are faster for some pairs of concepts than others, it is possible that the two concepts for which reaction times are faster are more closely associated in memory. That's the only thing the IAT can directly show: the closeness of association of concepts in memory—not "bias," not "racism." But it goes downhill from there; a slew of statistical issues and methodological artifacts suggest that the IAT is not even a clean measure of strength of association.
5. The IAT may capture prejudice, stereotypes, or attitudes to some degree, but, if so, it is not a clean measure.
Critiques of the IAT have concluded that it contains more error than attitude or reflects actual knowledge about actual group differences and conditions; and that IAT scores reflect four separate phenomena, of which attitude is just one.
6. The IAT, as used and reported, has a potpourri of additional methodological and statistical oddities.
Although a deep dive into them is beyond the scope of this blog, the interested reader can find them laid out in gory and technical details here and in the online repository of articles.
7. Many of the studies that use IAT scores to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.
If "unconscious racism" was as powerful and pervasive as its advocates claim, one would expect some, and probably a great deal, of anti-Black discrimination in these studies. Its absence in many studies justifies significant skepticism about claims about the power or prevalence of implicit bias.
8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.
Racial prejudice is real and is readily measured by self-report scales assessing attitudes towards various racial and ethnic groups. It is not clear that the IAT captures much beyond these self-report scales, though.
9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.
One might ask, then, the point of such procedures and why is there such enthusiasm for these trainings.
10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.
It's not that there is "no evidence." This is not a case of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It is a case of "there is tons of evidence, but most of it shows little or no effect."
11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are "unconscious."
Research finds that people are quite good at predicting their IAT scores.
12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students. Gambrill & Reiman, 2011, defined propaganda as “encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible” (p. e19516). Does extolling research on the IAT without presenting its limitations and weaknesses constitute "encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible"? I leave that to you to decide. Regardless, this omission is contrary to the aims of science.
What This All Means
Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.
==
WIGGUM: OK, here's how the process works. You sit on the broom and we shove you off the cliff.
MARGE: What?!
WIGGUM: Well, hear me out, if you're innocent, you will fall to an honorable Christian death. If you are, however, the bride of Satan, you will surely fly your broom to safety. At that point you will report back here for torture and beheading.
SKINNER: Tough, but fair.
Research is reviewed and evaluated with respect to the support for primary claims about microaggressions.
The research usually assessed perceived microaggressions rather than enactment of microaggressions.
The research has failed to demonstrate that behaviors claimed to be microaggressions are caused by racism.
The research has failed to demonstrate that behaviors claimed to microaggressions are frequently experienced.
The research has failed to demonstrate that experiencing microaggressions has negative causal effects on those who perceive them.
We critically evaluate common claims about microaggressions. Most studies address perceptions of microaggressions, not microaggressions per se. Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, research has not established that racism causes microaggressions nor that microaggressions adversely affect the well-being of those who perceive the. Accordingly, after 50 years of scholarship on microaggressions, the central claims of proponents remain unsubstantiated.
Section snippets
Most research on microaggressions does not address microaggressions
Most research framed as addressing “microaggressions” assesses subjective perceptions of microaggressions. Unfortunately, neither self-reports [5] nor memories of experiences [6] infallibly correspond to reality. Scientists do not assess global warming by asking people if they feel warmer; they assess global temperatures. Elections are not determined by asking the candidates how many votes they received; they are assessed by counting votes.
…
Correlation does not mean causation
Though possible, it is extremely difficult to establish causality based solely on correlations (11). It requires large, representative samples; articulating, testing, and corroborating a causal model; ruling out confounders; and showing the hypothesized model is superior to alternatives [11]. No published research claiming that racism causes microaggressions or that microaggressions have “impacts” on health or mental health has attempted anything like this.
…
Experimental studies of microaggressions and their limitations
The systematic review discussed previously [7] also identified five experiments wherein researchers created vignettes involving ostensible microaggressions and assessed third party reactions. For example, in one [13], participants read vignettes depicting an interaction between two people involving a “microaggression.” Sixty-five graduate students provided their opinions about the main “perceived negative effect on the targets.” The study didn't assess effects on targets.
…
An epistemically perverse defense of microaggressions
Microaggression scholarship has a peculiar form of insulation against criticism. It often is framed as anti-racist [e.g. Refs. [16,17]]. If one presumes that criticizing anti-racism is racist, then criticizing microaggression research is racist. This is epistemically perverse because it permits microaggression advocates to deflect any scientific criticism or skepticism as racism.
…
Clinical implications
Despite flaws and limitations of microaggression scholarship, we do not doubt that people sometimes experience them. Therapists routinely treat clients struggling with interpersonal problems in the workplace or in their social lives, including potentially experiencing microaggressions. Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) practitioners routinely ask clients to track upsetting interpersonal episodes, noting the context, what happened, the client's interpretation of the other person's behavior…
Conclusion
Despite decades of scholarship on microaggressions, the main claims remain generally unsubstantiated. Much is known about subjective self-reported experiences as measured by dubious questionnaires of unknown validity that may or may not assess “microaggressions,” and the correlates of these measures with mental health. No studies have attempted to assess whether racism causes the behaviors deemed microaggressive by presumptive experts or by proponents of microaggression theory. Nor have any
Draft of An Article on Verge of Journal Submission
By: Lee Jussim
Published: Oct 17, 2025
It has only taken me 40+ years in academia to have written a short, readable, academic article. Presented here is a draft of an article that was invited for a special issue of a journal on the politicization of psychotherapy. There is only a little psychotherapy here, because I told them I have no expertise in it (though my co-author certainly does), and asked if, instead, I could write a critique of research on microaggressions, which are prominently promoted as important and scientifically well-established by clinical and counseling psychologists. They are completely wrong.
Luckily for me, the special issue editors gave me the green light to do the article. As a draft, this is likely to change because journals almost never accept initially submitted articles as-is. They may reject it outright, in which case I’d consider revising it to address their reasons for doing so. Even if they do not reject it, the most one can usually hope for after an initial submission is a “revise and resubmit,” which means, more or less, “we kinda liked your paper but some of it sucks and we are not sure if you can deal with the stuff that sucks, but we’ll give you a chance and re-evaluate the paper then.” So the paper is likely to change.
Nonetheless, this is functionally like a “preprint.” Preprints are … just this. Articles written but not yet published, sometimes under review at journals. I do not think I have ever seen a preprint posted on Substack but … so what?
Criticisms on anything from the key ideas to our wrongly claiming “no studies have ever…” (maybe we missed something; I do not think so, but you never know what you don’t know) to typos are invited and welcome.
Without further ado…
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Research on Microaggressions and Their Impacts Assesses Neither Microaggressions nor Their Impacts
Lee Jussim, Rutgers
Richard J. McNally, Harvard University
ABSTRACT (for nonacademics, you can treat this as a sorta tl;dr or the Summary Up Front that you sometimes see in my posts).
We review and critically evaluate the ability of the empirical research on microaggressions to substantiate the major common scholarly claims about them. We find that the literature exclusively addresses perceptions of microaggressions rather than microaggressions per se, and that it has not even attempted to address the role of racism. Scholarship claiming to identify negative “impacts” of microaggressions fails to do so because: 1. It assesses perceptions of microaggressions rather than microaggressions per se; and 2. It has assessed correlates of perceptions of microaggressions without assessing the causal processes producing those correlations. We conclude that, after 50 years of scholarship on microaggressions, none of the main claims about them have been scientifically substantiated.
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Microaggressions refer to subtle intergroup insults that instantiate and stem from racism (Sue et al., 2007). A microaggression, therefore, is a racist act committed by a perpetrator directed at some target. Most definitions also characterize them as caused by either intentional or unconscious prejudice (e.g. Pierce, 1970; Sue et al. 2007; Williams, 2020). Clinical and counseling psychologists have been among the most active participants in the theoretical and empirical debates regarding microaggressions (e.g., Lilienfeld, 2017; Sue et al., 2007; Williams, 2020). Concern about the sensitivities of minoritized individuals has prompted training programs to detect microaggressions. In this article, we critically evaluate research on microaggressions and address clinical implications.
The Vast Majority of Research on Microaggressions Does Not Address Microaggressions
Nearly all empirical research framed as addressing “microaggressions” assesses subjective perceptions of microaggression. The problem should be obvious. Realities are not revealed by assessing perceptions. Elections are not determined by asking the candidates how many votes they believe they received; they are assessed by counting votes. Scientists do not assess global warming by asking people if they feel warmer; they assess global temperatures. To state what should be obvious (but is obviously not obvious in the case of research on microaggressions), subjective reports of experiences with external realities are not the same phenomena as those external realities.
Accordingly, it is not possible to reach conclusions about microaggressions based solely on studies of subjective perceptions of microaggression experiences. Yet microaggression advocates routinely promulgate such conclusions. Consider a recent systematic review of research on “microaggressions” (Newman, Chrispal, Dunwoodie & Macaulay 2025). It identified 26 qualitative studies – all assessed self-reported “experiences” with being the target of microaggressions. It also identified 14 quantitative studies using a survey research design. In all cases, the survey questions assessed self-reported experiences with microaggressions. Although Newman et al. (2025) acknowledged that the research they reviewed primarily assessed perceptions held by targets, throughout the paper, they referred to the research they reviewed as addressing microaggressions rather than “perceptions of microaggressions.”
Such studies provided no direct information about microaggressions. Whether they provide any indirect evidence regarding microaggressions would require an assessment of the relationship of microaggressive behaviors of actual transgressors with scales purporting to assess experiences with microaggressions. None of the studies in their review even attempted this, and, as far as we know, it has never been done in other studies.
Microaggression Questionnaires Do Not Assess Microaggressions
To highlight these and other limitations to measures of perceptions of microaggressions, we focus on one (Nadal, 2011) that was characterized by a prominent microaggression advocate (Williams, 2020, p.13) as “Another important measure of microaggression frequency” (the same problems characterize all microaggression questionnaires we know of (see, e.g., Newman et al.’s [2025] review)). Nadal’s (2011) microaggression questionnaire exclusively measured targets’ subjective reports of the frequency with which they have experienced various events simply labeled as “microaggressions” by Nadal (such as “Someone avoided eye contact with me because of my race.”). Nadal’s (2011) studies did not test:
Whether the reported experiences correspond to the behaviors of supposed perpetrators
The assumed motivation for the supposedly microaggressive behaviors are correct (e.g., based in racism)
The supposedly microaggressive behaviors were motivated by unconscious racism.
Furthermore, Nadal (2011) found that people reported experiencing the purported microaggressions as extremely infrequent (typically no more than three times in the past six months). Therefore, even if one accepts the dubious proposition that subjective reports of the frequency of experiences with microaggressions over the past six months are valid measures of microaggressions, this disconfirmed claims that microaggressions are frequent (Sue et al., 2007; Williams, 2020). Nearly all studies of “microaggressions” reviewed by Newman et al. (2025) focused on “lived experience,” used versions of Nadal’s (2011) questionnaire, or used the Racial Microaggressions Scale (Torres-Harding, Andrade Jr, & Romero Diaz, 2012), which also exclusively assesses subjective self-reports about experiences with microaggressions.
Correlation Still Does Not Mean Causation
It is possible, yet extremely difficult, to establish causality on the basis of correlations (e.g., Rohrer, 2018). Doing so requires, among other things, articulating, testing, and confirming explicit causal models of processes, testing them against alternative models, and finding more support for the hypothesized model than the alternatives. This has never been done in any research on microaggressions. Two additional hurdles to establishing causality on the basis of correlations are confounders and lack of representative samples (Rohrer, 2018). Both problems characterize microaggression research. For example, consider a study (Kanter et al., 2017) described by Williams (2020, p. 12) as providing “...important empirical support for something that diversity researchers knew all along-microaggressive acts are rooted in racist beliefs.”
Kanter et al. (2017) found that measures of racism correlated about r=.4 with their measure of microaggressions. In contrast to most other microaggression research, a strength of their measure was that, instead of assessing subjective reports of experiences with microaggressions, it assessed White participant’s self-reported tendencies to “microaggress” (why this is in quotes will soon be apparent). This sounds like strong evidence until one closely considers the study’s methods.
First, one cannot infer a particular causal direction from a correlation However, even stipulating the unevidenced assumption that racism did cause responses on their “microaggression” scale, examining the features of that scale is informative.
Kanter et al. (2017) gave participants interracial scenarios in which they were to imagine themselves interacting. Participants were then asked questions about what they might think or say in the situation. For example, they were asked if they would think or say, “‘Did you get into school through a minority scholarship?” (presumed to be a microaggression). Response options were: 1 (‘‘I wouldn’t think it at all’’), 2 (‘‘I would think it but definitely wouldn’t say/do it’’), 3 (‘‘I would think it but probably not say/do it’’), 4 (‘‘I would think it, and I might say/do it’’), and 5 (‘‘I would think it and probably would say/do it’’). Participants responded to 30 such questions, which were summed to form the “microaggression” scale that correlated about .4 with racism measures.
The validity of participants’ responses was not empirically evaluated, so whether they would actually say or think in a manner consistent with their responses is unknown. If the responses were invalid, the measure provides no information about microaggressions. If the responses were valid, few participants would commit microaggressions. Responses of 1 and 2 are definitely not microaggressions (thinking something is not a microaggression). Even response option 3 indicates they claimed they would probably not verbalize the microaggression. For their White participants, 23 items had means below 2 and only one had a mean above 3. Standard deviations for most items were around 1.0 If the responses were valid, Kanter et al.’s (2017) data few of their participants would commit microaggressions.
The evidence of racism causing “microaggressions” is even weaker than this suggests. Only 14 of the 30 “microaggressions” correlated with racism at p < .05, meaning that 16 were statistically indistinguishable from zero. If “based on racism” is an empirical hypothesis, more than half the items failed to support it. Compounding this issue, no method was used to account for the large number of statistical tests (conventional methods would involve requiring a lower p-value threshold, rendering even fewer of the items “significantly” correlated with racism).
Last, it was a small-scale study (33 black and 118 white students) from a college in Kentucky. These numbers are so small and unrepresentative of any population that the entire study should be viewed as preliminary rather than as establishing important generalizable scientific facts. Indeed, its title begins with “A Preliminary Report…” Our view is that two necessary conditions for justifiably considering research “important” are confidence in its replicability and in the validity of the conclusions. This single small study, which has never been replicated, does not justify such confidence.
Kanter et al.’s (2017) correlational study has then be used in major reviews of microaggressions research to unjustifiably claim support for the assumption that racism causes microaggressions. For example, Williams’s (2020, p. 12) has a section header: “Microaggressions are Caused (at Least in Part) by Racial Biases.” The section reviews Kanter et al., (2017) and other research she described as similar, which, as we have already shown, provided correlations of their measure of “microaggressions” with racism rather than experimental evidence of a causal effect.
Sometimes, causal claims are slipped in more subtly. Except when discussing objects smashing into one another, “impact” is one of those synonyms of “cause” that are used by researchers to avoid the obviously red flag that would be raised by using “cause” when referring to correlational studies, and still make (unjustified) causal claims on the basis of such studies (Corneille et al., 2023). For example, on On page 15 of Williams (2020), another section header declares, “Microaggressions Exert an Adverse Impact on Mental Health” and this appears in the first paragraph: “... microaggressions and the largely overlapping construct termed everyday racial discrimination are in fact associated with many negative mental health consequences…” followed by a long list of correlational studies. “Associated with” is correct; “adverse impacts” are not established by studies assessing “associations.”
Experimental Studies of Microaggressions and Their Limitations
Newman et al.’s (2025) systematic review identified five experimental studies in which researchers created vignettes involving ostensible microaggressions and assessed third party reactions. For example, Kim, Block & Nguyen (2019) created vignettes involving an interaction between two people capturing what they characterized as “microaggressions” to 65 graduate students. Participants provided their opinions about the main “perceived negative effect on the targets.” The study did not assess actual effects on actual targets.
Whether their vignettes meet the definition of microaggressions as subtle insults is also doubtful. For example, in one vignette, an employee overheard a manager refer to Chinese people as “Chinks.” This is a blatant racist slur, not a microaggression. The vignettes were created in consultation with what they referred to as “subject matter experts,” so that the use of a vignette that is blatant rather than subtle racism casts doubt on the expertise of these experts.
Similar limitations characterize other experimental studies of “microaggressions” (e.g., Basford, Offermann & Behrend, 2014; Offermann, Basford, Graebner, Jaffer, De Graaf, & Kaminsky, 2014). Rather than basing vignettes on behaviors empirically demonstrated to stem from subtle or unconscious racism, the vignettes were typically developed based on consultations with “microaggression experts.” This raises questions about the credibility of experts who claim expertise without a scientific base of studies identifying actual microaggressions.
Clinical Implications
We are not the first to critique research on microaggressions (e.g. Cantu & Jussim, 2021; Lilienfeld, 2017). Lilienfeld concluded the field “is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application” (2017, p. 138), a conclusion consistent with those of Cantu & Jussim (2021) and the present review. Accordingly, he called for a moratorium on training programs teaching people how to identify microaggressions and policies designed to identify and punish alleged perpetrators.
Two years after Lilienfeld’s death, an article listed eight eminent scholars in psychology’s history whose work had “advanced racism” (Williams, Faber, & Duniya, 2022). Each name was accompanied by the psychologist’s “representative racist belief.” Lilienfeld appeared in this rogue’s gallery for arguing that: “Racial microaggressions are unproven and probably not harmful.”
A reply to Williams et al. (2022), co-signed by 63 social psychologists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists from around the world (McNally et al., 2024) pointed out how the accusation that Lilienfeld was advancing racism is traceable to the controversial concept of microaggressions itself. Microaggression scholarship often is framed as anti-racist (e.g., Williams, et al., 2022). In this perspective, opposing anti-racism is racist, so that criticizing microaggression research is racist. Thus, microaggression scholarship has a peculiar form of insulation against refutation. Critiques of the theory, being “racist,” count as further support for the phenomenon. Consistent with our “peculiar form of insulation” analysis, in a reply (Faber & Williams, 2024),pointed to the long list of co-signers being nearly all white males as if that somehow was relevant to refuting the substance of their critique.
This rhetorical move – accusations of promoting racism for the act of criticizing microaggression scholarship – both violates and risks short-circuiting the type of organized skepticism that Merton (1942/1973) argued is one of the pillars on which scientific validity and credibility rests. There is a long and ugly history of shoddy “science” being produced when a scientific community is cowed into silence through either repressive authorities or conformity induced by fear of public denunciations (Salmon & Jussim, 2025).
The many limitations of microaggression research means that it is not ready to be used to design real world or therapeutic interventions. The goals of psychotherapy should often include facilitating resilience and well-being. Improved social relations is one of the main outcomes clients value in psychotherapy (Ladmanová et al., 2025). Whereas helping clients cope with experiences of bigotry is appropriate for therapy, leading clients to interpret ambiguous situations as manifestations of bigotry risks doing more harm than good. Rather than facilitating constructive social interactions, it is likely to induce anger and resentment (Jagdeep et al., 2024). Whether therapy that induces clients to see ambiguous interactions as microaggressions leads to better long term outcomes than does therapy that cultivates interpersonal generosity, is an empirical question, that, as far as we know, has never been addressed. We predict the opposite, that cultivating what Haidt (2017) termed “generosity of spirit” is, in general, likely to produce better psychotherapeutic outcomes than cultivating a cognitive mindset that sees hostility in ambiguous interactions.
Conclusion
Despite 50 years of scholarship on microaggressions, the main claims about them have not been empirically demonstrated. Much is known about subjective self-reported experiences as measured by dubious questionnaires of unknown validity that may or may not assess perceptions of “microaggressions,” and the correlates of these measures. Correlations do not demonstrate “impact.” No studies have attempted to assess whether racism causes the specific behaviors labeled as microaggressions by “experts” and advocates.
Experimental research framed as addressing microaggressions instead assesses subjective perceptions of acts that experts have deemed “microaggressions,” even though such acts often do not fit the definition of microaggressions. Conclusions about “impacts” of “microaggressions” (measured by subjective self-reports of experiences rather than by measuring microaggressive behaviors) are based entirely on cross-sectional, correlational studies that have not even attempted to identify, let alone test, specific causal models. To date, the major claims of microaggression advocates have not been subject to empirical test. Although an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is also no evidence whatsoever for the main claims of microaggression advocates.
