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Diversity is a desired attribute for many organizations. Yet, there is limited scientific understanding of what leads people to perceive diversity, and past studies focus on racial diversity to the exclusion of other social identities. We investigated how an individual's race and gender conjointly impact their perceived contributions to organizational diversity and whether context-driven gender salience affects these judgments. Study 1 established that, in the absence of an organizational context, women of color are considered to contribute more to diversity than men of color, White women, and White men. In Studies 2A–2C, we manipulated an organization's demographic composition and found that female representation affected White women's perceived contributions to diversity more than Black women's perceived contributions to diversity. Similarly, in Study 3, we found that an organization's history of gender discrimination increased White women's, but not Black women's, perceived contributions to diversity. This research has implications for diversity-related hiring decisions.

Young and colleagues' recent article substantially contributes to the understanding of multiracial perception generally and in the context of affirmative action. Their introduction of socioeconomic status as a relevant factor in the perception of Latino‐White biracials highlights our need for additional research identifying which target characteristics and perceiver motives influence the perception of multiracials and under what conditions these relationships occur. We outline how future research can incorporate and expand on Young et al.'s work to better understand multiracial person perception and specify the most appropriate contexts in which these findings could be applied by practitioners.

We hypothesized that women avoid male-dominated domains because they anticipate lacking the power to influence others in those contexts. In Study 1, a questionnaire study, male undergraduates were more interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors than were female undergraduates, and this gender disparity was mediated by women anticipating having less power in STEM fields than men did. Study 2 experimentally demonstrated that a lack of female representation within an academic context (MBA program) led women to infer that they would lack power in that context. Consequently, they became less interested in the program and in business schools in general. Our findings indicate that expecting low interpersonal power is an important mechanism by which women lose interest in pursuing male-dominated fields.

People's emotional states often depend on the emotions of others. Consequently, to predict their own responses to social interactions (i.e., affective forecasts), we contend that people predict the emotional states of others (i.e., empathic forecasts). We propose that empathic forecasts are vulnerable to stereotype biases and demonstrate that stereotypes about the different emotional experiences of race (Experiment 1) and sex groups (Experiment 2) bias empathic forecasts. Path modeling in both studies demonstrates that stereotype-biased empathic forecasts regarding how a target individual will feel during a social interaction are associated with participants' affective forecasts of how they will feel during that interaction with the target person. These affective forecasts, in turn, predict behavioral intentions for the social interaction before it even begins. Stereotypes can therefore indirectly bias affective forecasts by first influencing the empathic forecasts that partly constitute them. In turn, these potentially biased affective forecasts determine social behaviors.

The current research tested whether the passing of government legislation, signaling the prevailing attitudes of the local majority, was associated with changes in citizens' attitudes. Specifically, with ∼1 million responses over a 12-y window, we tested whether state-by-state same-sex marriage legislation was associated with decreases in antigay implicit and explicit bias. Results across five operationalizations consistently provide support for this possibility. Both implicit and explicit bias were decreasing before same-sex marriage legalization, but decreased at a sharper rate following legalization. Moderating this effect was whether states passed legislation locally. Although states passing legislation experienced a greater decrease in bias following legislation, states that never passed legislation demonstrated increased antigay bias following federal legalization. Our work highlights how government legislation can inform individuals' attitudes, even when these attitudes may be deeply entrenched and socially and politically volatile.

As multiracial children of foreign-born parents, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama embody diversity in politics for many perceivers. Yet some have also questioned their loyalty to their respective groups. We explored perceptions of dual group members' (DGM; dual nationals, multiracial people, and dual state residents) loyalty among first-party (those who share a group membership with a DGM target) and third-party perceivers (those who do not). Studies 1a–2b showed that first- and third-party perceivers rated DGMs as less loyal than their single group member (SGM) counterparts. However, only first- (Studies 2a–2b) but not third-party (Studies 1a–1b) perceivers preferred SGMs to DGMs for loyalty-dependent roles. Study 3 revealed that perceivers who were higher in patriotism supported DGMs for loyalty-dependent roles less when they were first- (vs. third) party observers. These studies suggest that perceivers readily intuit that DGMs are less loyal than SGMs and, under some conditions, this may lead to discrimination.