Diversity management from a target’s perspective: a pre-registered experiment on Latinos, multiculturalism, and colorblindness

ABSTRACT

Political elites have formulated multiculturalism and colorblindness to manage intergroup relations in diverse polities. Multiculturalism celebrates intergroup differences, while colorblindness emphasizes intergroup commonalities. Prior research finds varied effects for these ideologies but primarily focuses on majority groups. We report a pre-registered experiment that evaluates these ideologies among Latinos – America’s largest ethnically minoritized group. We hypothesized that multiculturalism and colorblindness would increase (decrease) one’s inclination to view oneself as Latino, with downstream consequences for their political views. We also explored whether each ideology’s impact was moderated by individual differences in preferences towards cultural assimilation. We find that multiculturalism has no measurable effects, yet colorblindness undermines participants’ sense of being Latino. This effect emerges among Latinos who strongly prefer to remain culturally distinct and is associated with greater ingroup favoritism and stronger support for policies that broadly improve the life chances of people of color (e.g., affirmative action). We discuss how our results improve our understanding of intergroup politics in a diversifying United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Latino politics
• moderated-mediation
• survey experiment
• multiculturalism
• colorblind ideology
• assimilation preferences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite accumulated evidence that SDO is a stable trait, we find that this measure was affected by one of our treatments (β_{multiculturalism}= .013, s.e. = .017, p < .451; β_{colorblindness}= -.036, s.e. = .017, p<.037). We call attention to this direct effect because it aligns with what one would expect: namely, exposure to colorblind ideology reduces preferences for greater equality between groups. It is all the more important to underline this unanticipated finding since most work on SDO does not center around Latinos.

2 To be sure, this downstream association between self-stereotyping and these outcomes can emerge without any involvement of exposure to colorblind ideology. But our claims are about the indirect effect of colorblindness on our outcomes through our proposed mediator, self-stereotyping as Latino. Thus, both empirical patterns must emerge in order to lend some support to our proposed mediation framework.

3 Although we expected that a reduction in self-stereotyping would produce decreases in our pro-minority outcomes, what we observe instead is a series of positive associations. This unexpected pattern can be interpreted as normatively reassuring, since the social rejection that colorblindness implies for Latinos is countered by some of them through their expression of support for a broad suite of pro-minority outcomes.