Pervasive and pernicious underestimation of Asian Americans' support for affirmative action

Abstract

Polling data show that 69% of Asian American voters favor affirmative action. However, Asian Americans were featured prominently by the organization Students for Fair Admissions, which played a central role in the Supreme Court's decision to overturn affirmative action. This may distort people's estimates of Asian Americans’ support for affirmative action. Two studies (N = 695) found that people, even Asian Americans, underestimated Asian Americans’ support for affirmative action. Three follow-up studies (N = 1,625), where we manipulated perceived Asian Americans’ support for affirmative action or the Supreme Court's decision, found no evidence that such information affected White people's support for affirmative action. In Study 6 (N = 365), however, we found that Asian Americans were more likely to agree with the Supreme Court's decision to overturn affirmative action when they saw that a majority of Asian Americans supported the court ruling (relative to a control condition in which no information was presented). This suggests that the widespread misperception of Asian Americans’ support for affirmative action and their central role in the Supreme Court cases may ultimately create a self-fulfilling prophecy that could shift individual Asian Americans’ own attitude about affirmative action.