As a cisgender, heterosexual woman researching LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion, I’ve encountered both the advantages and challenges that come with my social identity. Fellow researchers in social justice and group-based inequality may recognize this common dilemma: when you belong to the marginalized group you study, you’re sometimes seen as biased. When you don’t, you’re perceived as uninformed.
This tension made me curious — how common are these perceptions, and what drives them? Fortunately, I wasn’t alone in wondering. Together with Erdem Ozan Meral and Corinne Moss-Racusin, I set out to explore whether our intuitions held up in the data, and to better understand the mechanisms behind these perceptions.
Want to know what we found? Our paper is now published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) — and it’s available open access!
Read More Biased, Yet More Informed? Documenting Me-Search Stigma Primarily Linked to Researchers’ Own Group Memberships here
Abstract
“Me-searchers” study topics directly or indirectly relevant to themselves—such as social groups they belong to—and are often stigmatized as being more biased (though sometimes more informed) than those researching topics unrelated to their own experience. This study explores how queer and straight researchers are perceived when studying anti-queer bias or other topics through three pre-registered experiments (N = 823). When both studied anti-queer bias, the queer me-searcher was perceived as more biased, and the straight researcher was perceived as less informed than identical (straight and queer) researchers studying a different topic. Target researchers motivated by social justice (vs. theoretical) implications were also perceived as more biased. Crucially, we identified and tested three conceptual accounts about why and how me-searchers are stigmatized. Supporting the existence of me-search stigma, our results suggest that not only me-searchers but also allied researchers are stereotyped when studying prejudice and discrimination.
