BIO

I am Amara Woodward, and I'm from Tampa, Florida. I am a first-year student here at FSU in the Honors college, and I am a Behavioral Neuroscience major on a pre-med track. I would like to be a sports psychiatrist once I am done with school, and I would ideally like to work with collegiate and professional sports organizations and teams. There aren't many research topics that I'm not interested in, but some of my current interests are how trauma is expressed in the body, sleep studies, and how mental health impacts daily functioning.

Role of Deliberate Ignorance on Overestimation of Racial Equality

Abstract

Racial inequality is a widespread issue in the United States, both in our history and in our contemporary society. The pervasiveness of racial inequality may be due to the misperception of many that racial inequality is a vestige of the past. Ignorance of the oppression of a significant percentage of people in the United States presents a barrier to impactful progress toward eliminating racial inequality. In this study, we investigated whether participants would seek to inform themselves regarding potentially new information about race-related issues and how seeking such information would impact their misperception of racial inequality. Participants were randomly assigned to either a race or non-race condition, where they had an opportunity to reflect and read on hypothetical scenarios and popular misconception about race-related or non-race related topics. We found deliberate ignorance to be positively associated with overestimating modern racial equality and information seeking was negatively associated with overestimating modern racial equality in the race-condition. In the non-race condition, deliberate ignorance or information seeking were found to have no association with the estimation of racial equality. Further, we found that condition significantly affected overestimation of racial equality; people in the race-condition – who had the chance to correct their race-related misconceptions – were less likely to overestimate present-day racial equality than people in the non-race-condition. This points to the fact that when we provide people with accurate information related to racial issues and they decide to seek out this information, they sometimes do correct their misperceptions about racial equality.

Keywords: prejudice, justice motivation, ignorance, racial inequality