Glenn Adams

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Kansas

Research has documented the identity relevance of racism perception, such that White Americans tend to deny the prevalence of racism and inequality in the United States to a greater extent than do Americans from other ethnic‐racial groups. Across two studies ( N = 971), we draw on temporal comparison theory to investigate how the identity relevance...

The study of happiness and related topics like well-being is a rapidly expanding area of scientific research. The dominant theories for these constructs emerged from research in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) settings. This chapter questions this tradition by thinking about happiness and well-being from here: the We...

Recent manifestations of racial violence have renewed conversations about structural racism. An important question for psychologists concerns how they might contribute to scholarship that adequately illuminates and confronts structural racism. In this paper, we consider whether environmental psychology (EP)—a discipline unique in its attention to t...

Recent manifestations of racial violence have renewed conversations about racism in society. An important question for psychologists, who tend to study of racism as a problem of “tainted hearts and minds,” concerns how they might contribute to scholarship that illuminates and confronts structural racism. In this paper, we consider whether environme...

A core tenet of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an understanding of systemic racism as a defining and constitutive feature of the Eurocentric modern order. In contrast to this foundational insight, discussions in hegemonic social psychology tend to approach racism in a manner—specifically, as prejudice and individual bias—that abstracts the topic fro...

Researchers in environmental psychology celebrate the potential for state and national parks to inspire civic engagement in the issue of climate change. Yet, prevailing conceptions of nature may reflect ongoing colonial concerns, such that parks may represent a space to avoid thinking about—rather than reckon with—escalating ecological crises. In t...

Researchers in environmental psychology celebrate the potential for state and national parks to inspire civic engagement in the issue of climate change. Yet, prevailing conceptions of nature may reflect ongoing colonial concerns, such that parks may represent a space to avoid thinking about—rather than reckon with—escalating ecological crises. In t...

This chapter reviews strategies for challenging colonialism and androcentrism in psychology. It examines how knowledge and practice in mainstream psychology reflects and reproduces coloniality through positioning ways of being observed across the world, and particularly in colonized spaces, as pathological deviations from Western norms. The authors...

Relationship research in the dominant psychological science portrays the prioritization of conjugal over consanguine relationships as a healthy standard. We argue that this “standard” pattern is only evident in cultural ecologies of independence. Drawing on the Confucian concept of filial piety, we conducted five studies and two mini meta-analyses...

Conventional wisdom and scientific research suggest that political conservatism is at odds with environmental concern. Across two survey studies and one experiment (total N = 2,005) we consider the possibility that this relationship varies by type of environmentalism and ethnic-racial category. Results indicate that whereas political conservatism w...

Cultural appropriation refers to an action whereby an individual makes use of, imitates, or takes possession of cultural products of an outgroup or source community. Compared to Black Americans, many White Americans do not differentiate between high (i.e., White) and low (i.e., Black) status actors when making judgments of cultural appropriation (M...

This review examines the coloniality infused within the conduct and third reporting of experimental research in what is commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli‐Palestinian conflict’. Informed by a settler colonial framework and decolonial theory, our review measured the appearance of sociopolitical terms and critically analysed the reconciliation meas...

Gender gaps in representation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields persist across many societies, although the size of the gap varies. Based on cultural psychological perspectives, we consider how the culturally ascribed meaning and purpose of academic choice (i.e., as a means of expressing the self or securing one’s fu...

We conducted two studies to explore Ghanaian understandings of well-being through a situation sampling method in which participants described situations that increased and decreased their well-being. Participants in Study 1 were 80 community members (Mean Age = 41.962; SD=13.900; 40 women, 40 men) who responded in the context of interviews through...

In this contribution to the special issue, we explore implications of decolonial theory for understanding climate change skepticism and environmental concern. The empirical portion of this project entailed interviews about perceptions of recent extreme weather, climate change, and environmental concern with N = 41 visitors to a Kansas (USA) state p...

The mutually exclusive authoritarianisms (i.e., nationalist, secular, and elitist vs. religious-Islamist) in West Asia (Middle East) do not correspond to the political structures in Euro-American settings (i.e., one traditional/conservative authority). This distinction suggests that the relationships of RWA and SDO with political ideologies and gen...

This article provides a conceptual introduction to the second installment of a two‐issue collection of work on decolonial approaches to the psychological study of social issues. Whereas papers in the first installment consider decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study, papers in this second installment consider psychology as a site fo...

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic prompted people and institutions to turn to online virtual environments for a wide variety of social gatherings. In this perspectives article, we draw upon our previous work and interviews with Ghanaian Christian leaders to consider implications of this shift. Specifically, we propose that the shift from physical...

During the year 2020, we were considering the problem of climate change anxiety in the Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City metro areas. In September of 2020, we partnered to conduct focus groups with environmentally engaged participants to understand their experience of climate change anxiety. We conducted 14 semi-structured focus groups with 46 comm...

This study was conducted during a period of lockdown and ban on social gatherings, including religious gatherings, in Ghana. The restrictions were instituted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of the study was to understand how the well-being of Christian church leaders was impacted during the prohibition in terms of aspects of their...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ghana government instituted a ban on social gatherings, including religious gatherings. To understand how the unanticipated restrictions and interruption in normal church routines affected the well-being of congregants in Ghana, we interviewed 14 religious leaders. Thematic analysis revealed psychospiritual...

Why do people comply with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) public health guidance? This study considers cultural-psychological foundations of variation in beliefs about motivations for such compliance. Specifically, we focused on beliefs about two sources of prosocial motivation: desire to protect others and obligation to society. Across two stu...

Coloniality represents the contemporary patterns of power and domination that emerged in the late 15th century during the so-called classic era of colonialism. Although much of psychology and psychological thought has adhered to the logic of coloniality, there is also a considerable body of work that has sought to decolonize psychology. It is withi...

Although many studies have examined gender and racial discrepancies in STEM participation, few have considered variation in the gendered construction of STEM across racial spaces. We applied a cultural psychological perspective to investigate whether variation in conceptions of gender identity across African American and European American settings...

A manifestation of coloniality in psychological science concerns the modern individualist lifeways that inform mainstream research. We report results of a multi‐method research project that investigated implications of these ways of being for the experience of love in Ghanaian settings. In particular, we investigated the hypothesis that engagement...

The cultural–ecological moderation hypothesis suggests that the importance of physical attractiveness (PA) for life outcomes is particularly pronounced in settings that afford constructions of the relationship as the product of choice. The current work addresses an ambiguity in earlier research that documented a cultural–ecological moderation effec...

Standard constructions of history pose a celebratory narrative of progress via modern individualist development. In contrast, decolonial perspectives emphasize the coloniality inherent both in Eurocentric modernity and in the individualist selfways associated with Eurocentric modernity. The coloniality of modern individualist selfways is evident no...

This contribution to the Frontiers research topic collection on African Cultural Models considers dilemma tales: an African knowledge practice in which narrators present listeners with a difficult choice that usually has ethical or moral implications. We adapted the dilemma tale format to create research tasks. We then used these research tasks to...

Decolonial perspectives challenge the notion that standard knowledge in hegemonic psychology is productive of progress and enlightenment. They instead emphasise its association with the colonial violence that constitutes the darker underside of modern development. Our contribution to the special issue applies a decolonial perspective to theory and...

Gender gaps in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) participation are larger in societies where women have greater freedom of choice. We provide a cultural psychological model to explain this pattern. We consider how individualistic/post-materialistic cultural patterns in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democrati...

This contribution to the collection of articles on “African Cultural Models” considers the topic of well-being. Reflecting modern individualist selfways of North American and European worlds, normative conceptions of well-being in hegemonic psychological science tend to valorize self-acceptance, personal growth, and autonomy. In contrast, given the...

Objectives: The aim of this field experiment was to test the effect of a social psychological intervention on an ethnically diverse sample of first-year college women majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). We hypothesized that grade point averages in STEM courses would be higher in the intervention condition relative to the...

This paper applies a decolonial approach to hegemonic psychological science by engaging marginalized knowledge perspectives of Disability Studies (DS) to reveal and disrupt oppressive knowledge formations associated with standard understandings of ability. In the first section of the paper, we draw upon mainstream DS scholarship to challenge indivi...

In this article, we approach the relationship between neoliberalism and psychological science from the theoretical perspective of cultural psychology. In the first section, we trace how engagement with neoliberal systems results in characteristic tendencies—including a radical abstraction of self from social and material context, an entrepreneurial...

Across two studies, U.S. participants read a fictional transcript of a law enforcement officer who observed a speeding infraction and made a discretionary traffic stop. The car carried occupants who displayed either high or low fit with Anglocentric constructions of U.S. identity and were of presumptive Mexican (Studies 1 and 2), Canadian (Study 1)...

The authors describe a cultural psychology approach to social–personality. Extending the standard social–psychological emphasis on the importance of context, the first section considers the cultural constitution of personal experience. Engagement with cultural affordances shapes a person with associated residual tendencies that constitute a form of...

The purpose of the study was to explore the extent to which contemporary social, economic, and religious developments inform social constructions of success in Ghana. Participants, consisting of 21 females and 39 males, aged between 20 and 70, from different educational and occupational backgrounds were interviewed about what they consider as succe...

Dominant models of economic development reflect and promote the individualist psychological models prevalent in the most affluent settings in the world. We apply a decolonial approach to illuminate the violence associated with these models. In one direction, these models are the product of colonial violence and expropriation that enabled the afflue...

In his address to the APA, King (1968) suggested that critical consciousness about racism, based on realities of African American experience, could serve as a tool for creative maladjustment: resistance to collective delusions and refusal to assimilate to pathological norms of a racist society. In this article, we summarize a program of research th...

We explored conceptions of love from the perspective of Ghanaian Christians. Using an ethnographic approach, we interviewed 61 participants (males = 39; females = 22; age range 20 to 70) on their understanding and experiences of love in the context of family. Thematic analysis of the interview data revealed understandings of love expression in meet...

Dominant representations of history evolve through differential exercise of power to enable memory of collective triumphs and silence memory of collective misdeeds. We examined silence regarding minorities in official constructions of history and the implications of this silence for national identity and intergroup relations in Turkey. A content an...

We apply a cultural psychology approach to collective memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In particular, we considered whether practices associated with commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks would promote vigilance (prospective affordance hypothesis) and misattribution of responsibility for the original 9/11 attacks (reconstructive memory h...

The present research applies a cultural psychological perspective on collective memory as mediated action to examine how constructions of a national past serve as tools that both reflect and shape national identity concerns. We employ a situation-sampling method to investigate collective memory in a series of studies concerning intergroup relations...

The authors describe three approaches evident in a collection of papers about “decolonizing psychological science” that they co-edited for the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. In the indigenous resistance approach, psychologists draw upon local knowledge to modify hegemonic practice and to produce psychologies that better resonate with l...

Theory and research in cultural psychology highlight the need to examine racism not only “in the head” but also “in the world.” Racism is often defined as individual prejudice, but racism is also systemic, existing in the advantages and disadvantages imprinted in cultural artifacts, ideological discourse, and institutional realities that work toget...

In this article, we describe a special thematic section on the topic of “Decolonizing Psychological Science” that we have edited for the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Three approaches to decolonization were evident in contributions to the ongoing project. In the indigenous resistance approach, researchers draw upon local knowledge to...

Hegemonic understandings rooted in the epistemic perspectives of the Global North explain global inequality (i.e., unequal relations between Global North and South) as a developmental gap in progress toward Eurocentric modernity. From this perspective, global inequality exists because Northern societies have created modern institutions and mentalit...

Decolonial approaches consider modernity in terms of its inherent “dark side”, coloniality: ways of thinking, feeling, and being associated with European global domination. We apply a decolonial approach to illuminate the coloniality inherent in the independent selfways that constitute standards of hegemonic psychological science. On one hand, thes...

Most research links (racial) essentialism to negative intergroup outcomes. We propose that this conclusion reflects both a narrow conceptual focus on biological/genetic essence and a narrow research focus from the perspective of racially dominant groups. We distinguished between beliefs in biological and cultural essences, and we investigated the i...

To fully understand the attractiveness bias, we propose that contextual factors or affordances should be integrated into the mating-based evolutionary account of Maestripieri et al. We review examples highlighting the role of contextual factors in the perception of attractiveness and in attractiveness bias. These suggest contextual factors differen...

Advocates for internationalisation of the undergraduate psychology curriculum anticipate a variety of beneficial outcomes strongly associated with forms of intellectual growth – including critical thinking, appreciation for diversity, and global awareness – that are the defining purpose of a university education. As a prelude to an intervention to...

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate the cultural socialization strategies that Trinidadian parents engage in with their adolescent children. We conducted 20 individual interviews and one focus group with adolescent parents in urban Trinidad. Trinidad and Tobago is renowned in the English-speaking Caribbean for its multiculturali...

A cultural-psychological analysis emphasizes the intentionality of everyday worlds: the idea that material products not only bear psychological traces of culturally constituted beliefs and desires, but also subsequently afford and promote culturally consistent understandings and actions. We applied this conceptual framework of mutual constitution i...

Intersectionality is an influential paradigm within feminist scholarship that centers subaltern experience to rethink conventional understandings of identity oppression and to reveal dynamics of privilege and subjugation within otherwise progressive formations. Despite these critical interventions, prevailing approaches to intersectionality focus n...

To fully understand the attractiveness bias, we propose that contextual factors or affordances should be integrated into Maestripieri et al.’s mating-based evolutionary account. We review examples highlighting the role of contextual factors in the perception of attractiveness and in attractiveness bias. These suggest contextual factors differential...

Dutt, Grabe, and Castro's (2015) research on implications of market participation for Maasai women's empowerment provides an important basis for rethinking liberatory standards of psychological science and international gender development. Drawing upon their research, we apply a decolonial feminist psychology analysis to the topic of empowerment. T...

Dutt, Grabe, and Castro’s (2015) research on implications of market participation for Maasai women’s empowerment provides an important basis for rethinking liberatory standards of psychological science and international gender development. Drawing upon their research, we apply a decolonial feminist psychology analysis to the topic of empowerment. T...

Available at: http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/rpj/vol1/iss1/1 Drawing upon previous research which finds that a sociocultural approach to teaching about racism results in increased consciousness about racism and support for antiracist policies (Adams et al., 2008b), we designed and implemented a tutorial consistent with this approach in our Cult...

Drawing upon previous research which finds that a sociocultural approach to teaching about racism results in increased consciousness about racism and support for antiracist policies (Adams et al., 2008), we designed and implemented a tutorial consistent with this approach in our Cultural Psychology courses. The tutorial presented undergraduate stud...

This paper engages the theme of " decolonizing psychological science " in the context of a perspective on psychological theory and research—namely, feminist psychology—that shares an emphasis on broad liberation. Although conceived as a universal theory and practice of liberation, scholars across diverse sites have suggested that feminism—perhaps e...

Despite unprecedented access to information and diffusion of knowledge across the globe, the bulk of work in mainstream psychological science still reflects and promotes the interests of a privileged minority of people in affluent centers of the modern global order. Compared to other social science disciplines, there are few critical voices who ref...

How should one respond to racial oppression? Conventional prescriptions of mainstream social psychological science emphasize the idea of coping with oppression—whether via emotional management strategies that emphasize denial or disengagement; problem-focused strategies that emphasize compensation, self-efficacy, or skills training; or collective s...

Social identity threat has negative consequences for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The present study examined whether legitimacy beliefs—beliefs that status differences between men and women in STEM fields are fair—put women at risk for experiencing social identity threat and poorer performance on a diffi...

We investigated how responses to interpersonal conflict differed across Ghana, Turkey, and the northern United States. Due to low levels of interpersonal embeddedness, people from individualistic cultures (northern United States) have more freedom to prioritize individual goals and to choose competitive and confrontational responses to conflict com...

In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgent focus on ecological features, especially various forms of mobility that afford social psychological processes. Extending this work, the current research examined whether relational mobility affects risk propensity. We conducted three studies using both correlational (Studies 1 and 3) and experimental (...

Previous research documented differences in friendship such that people in various North American settings reported more friends, emphasized emotional support, and de-emphasized instrumental support relative to people in various West African settings. We used an experimental manipulation to test the hypothesis that these patterns reflect affordance...

Comparisons of relationship experience across dimensions of cultural setting and gender reveal inconsistencies in conceptions of interdependence and relationality. Comparisons across cultural settings associate interdependent constructions of self with lower emphasis on emotional intimacy and self-disclosure. In contrast, research on gender differe...

Previous research has contrasted patterns of cautious or prevention-oriented relationality in various West African settings with patterns of growth or promotion-oriented relationality in many North American settings. The present research draws upon the concept of relational mobility to test the hypothesis that different patterns of relationality ha...

Stereotypes associating men and masculine traits with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are ubiquitous, but the relative strength of these stereotypes varies considerably across cultures. The present research applies an intersectional approach to understanding ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM partic...

Interdisciplinary scholarship has highlighted the coloniality of knowledge: The idea that mainstream research is an integral component of racialized modernity that reflects perspectives of the powerful and reproduces domination. To counteract the coloniality of knowledge, decolonial theorists advocate research strategies of accompaniment that draw...

Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged as an identity-conscious intervention within critical legal studies and has subsequently developed an interdisciplinary presence. We draw upon CRT perspectives to articulate five core ideas for a Critical Race Psychology (CRP). CRT perspectives (1) approach racism as a systemic force embedded in everyday society (...

We examined whether support for tough immigration legislation reflects identity-neutral enforcement of law or identity-relevant defense of privilege. Participants read a fabricated news story in which law-enforcement personnel detained a person due to “reasonable suspicion” that he was an undocumented immigrant. We manipulated descriptions of the d...

This study used a signal detection paradigm to explore the Marley hypothesis-that group differences in perception of racism reflect dominant-group denial of and ignorance about the extent of past racism. White American students from a midwestern university and Black American students from two historically Black universities completed surveys about...

Many African communities have appropriated the international practice of “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” (TRCs) as a means to construct a shared sense of collective memory, identity, and purpose in the aftermath of violent conflict. In this paper, we consider alternative forms of collective memory practices that might better suit the task of...

This work considers sociocultural foundations of self and agency in material affordances associated with affluence and poverty. We first review work that links independent self-construal and disjoint agency to material abundance. We then report an experiment among students at North American (n = 52) and West African (n = 60) universities, in which...

Preface This book has grown out of our own experience creating an interdisciplinary community of relationship researchers: the Close Relationships Interest Group at the University of Kansas. Since we formed the group in 2007, it has grown to include 10 to 20 active members who meet at least once a month. Each of us comes to the topic of relationshi...

Inspired by “Mother or Wife” African dilemma tales, the present research utilizes a cultural psychology perspective to explore the dynamic, mutual constitution of personal relationship tendencies and cultural-ecological affordances for neoliberal subjectivity and abstracted independence. We administered a resource allocation task in Ghana and the U...

This chapter applies a cultural psychology framework to provide a macrosocial account of social-personality psychology. Extending the standard social-psychological emphasis on the importance of context, the first section considers the cultural constitution of personal experience. A history of engagement with particular cultural affordances shapes a...

Does support for tough policies against undocumented immigration reflect anti-immigrant sentiments or a neutral concern about upholding laws? This study addresses the question by examining the relationship between different expressions of national identification and ethnocentric enforcement bias—that is, support for punishment of law-breaking immig...

Critical Race Theory (CRT) challenges scholars to reveal and dismantle disciplinary conventions that constitute racial power. In this Article, we take up this challenge and consider the potential for a Critical Race Psychology. Although CRT-compatible work has drawn upon psychological scientific research to challenge disciplinary conventions in law...

We test the hypothesis that knowledge of historically documented, anti-black conspiracies affects perceived plausibility of new, anti-black conspiracies. In Experiment 1 (N=78), African Americans and European Americans read about a current conspiracy aimed at undermining either African American or European American–elected officials. African Americ...

Abstract Previous studies document that attractiveness predicts life outcomes, including well-being and social connectedness. This study investigates whether the attractiveness–outcomes link is especially strong in settings, such as many urban areas, that promote relationship constructions as a product of personal choice. This link may weaken in se...

This paper investigates the identity implications of silence about genocide in commemorations of American Thanksgiving. In Study 1 we assessed the co-occurrence of national glorification themes with different forms of silence in commemoration products by conducting a content analysis of presidential Thanksgiving proclamations. In Study 2 we examine...