Support for diversity and the racial status quo in lay and legal samples.

Abstract

While attacks on diversity in higher education have clear ramifications for preserving the racial status quo in the U.S., the impact of embracing diversity is less clear. People may value diversity for some combination of the instrumental benefits diversity provides or their moral commitments to certain values. While decades of court precedent have contributed to the predominance of instrumental over moral rationales, little is known about the psychological factors underlying this differential popularity. Across two observational studies (N_Total = 1101) and one experiment (N = 197) with lay samples of White Americans, attitudes that favor the racial status quo undergirded participants' inclination toward instrumental over moral rationales. Studies 4 & 5 (N_Total = 285) yield a more complex picture of the potential association between an inclination towards instrumental rationales and endorsement of the status quo in judges' rulings and lawyers' defenses of universities' rights to race-conscious practices. These findings illustrate how university diversity practices-and the law governing them-can reflect dominant group preferences.