Kristin Anderson

• PhD
• Professor of Psychology at University of Houston - Downtown

Benign Bigotry delves into the multifaceted landscape of prejudice, spanning academic and scientific research, popular culture, and contemporary politics. At its core lies the concept of subtle prejudice-a pervasive, often unconscious bias in race, gender, and sexuality. Through meticulous analysis and the author's own experience serving eight year...

The tradition of the wife adopting her husband’s surname continues to be widely endorsed within the U.S. and many other nations. The current research focuses on perceptions of heterosexual women who violate this tradition. Specifically, we examined how women who retain their surname are evaluated with respect to their marriage commitment and person...

Objective: Multiracial feminist theory proposes that the meaning of feminism and the pathways to feminist identity may differ on the basis of cross-cutting social categories such as ethnicity and gender. However, there is currently little research that has included systematic examination of feminist identity among women and men from diverse ethnic...

We present psychological entitlement as a compelling lens with which to understand the dynamics of power, privilege, and resistance to progressive change. Feminist psychologists have rightly incorporated the role of power and privilege into discussions of sexism and other forms of inequality. We argue that entitlement should sit alongside power and...

Chapter 4 further explores the development of entitlement. This chapter is divided into two parts as it considers two areas of developmental influence: the peer group and mass media. The chapter begins with a look at the impact of social dominance goals (e.g., establishing power) of the peer group and the degree to which these goals affect peer int...

The political context producing the Donald Trump presidency put into stark relief the confusion, feelings of victimization, and rage of some constituencies that voted for him. Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged: Entitlement’s Response to Social Progress explores the role of entitlement in fostering inequality in the United States. Scholars and activists...

Chapter 6 explores the backlash to social progress by the entitled. Dominant group members are not accustomed to being bossed around. They tend to be ill-equipped to adapt to changing circumstances, and their resistance to change comes in many forms, with a range of consequences to themselves and others. Dominant group members are both highly sensi...

Chapter 2, Entitlement’s Cruel Cousins , surveys the psychological correlates of entitlement. What attitudes coincide with entitlement that perpetuate inequality? For example, entitlement is associated with overconfidence and immodesty. Entitlement is also associated with individualism and the belief in the myth of meritocracy. From poverty to sexu...

The conclusion presents the consequences of entitlement for individuals, the planet, and democracy. Entitlement makes people cognitively inflexible but also behaviorally, professionally, and politically unable to adapt to change. Dominant group members do not believe they should have to change and adapt, and they react emotionally when they are ask...

Chapter 1, Power, Privilege, and Entitlement , situates entitlement among related terms that help explain inequality, such as power and privilege . This chapter defines entitlement and details the way entitlement is measured. Experiments that assess entitlement find reliable differences in women’s and men’s sense of entitlement. Men tend to have an...

This chapter explores the ways in which entitlement facilitates ignorance, egocentrism, and inconsiderateness. People with power tend to engage in shoddy information processing. Compared to those who are marginalized, dominant group members think in shortcuts. Power emboldens people to be careless about repercussions, at least compared to those wit...

This chapter explores the development of entitlement in individuals. What entities surrounding the newborn, the child, and young adult facilitate the sense of deservingness that some people have relative to others? This chapter begins with the role that parents play in producing a child with a social dominance orientation or authoritarian tendencie...

The goal of the present research was to document ingroup prototypicality effects in implicit associations between ethnic groups and the American identity. Across four studies, we compared implicit associations displayed by perceivers who either belonged to or did not belong to the target ethnic groups. In Studies 1 and 2, African, Asian, Latino, an...

The connection between holding gender-traditional attitudes and the reluctance to identify as a feminist is well established, yet little is known about factors that might underlie this association. One factor that may serve this function is the tendency to hold negative stereotypes about feminists. Indeed, the constructs of ambivalent sexism (Glick...

Students' perceptions of lesbian and gay professors were examined in 2 studies (Ns = 622 and 545). An ethnically diverse sample of undergraduates read and responded to a syllabus for a proposed Psychology of Human Sexuality course. Syllabuses varied according to the political ideology, carefulness, sexual orientation, and gender of the professor. S...

This study examined students’ stereotypes of professors based on professor ethnicity, gender, teaching style, and course taught. An ethnically diverse sample of undergraduates (N=594) rated hypothetical professors on several dimensions including perceived warmth, professional competence, and difficulty. Evidence consistent with response amplificati...

Despite the popular belief that feminists dislike men, few studies have actually examined the empirical accuracy of this stereotype. The present study examined self-identified feminists' and nonfeminists' attitudes toward men. An ethnically diverse sample (N = 488) of college students responded to statements from the Ambivalence toward Men Inventor...

While overt prejudice is now much less prevalent than in decades past, subtle prejudice – prejudice that is inconspicuous, indirect, and often unconscious – continues to pervade our society. Laws do not protect against subtle prejudice and, because of its covert nature, it is difficult to observe, and frequently goes undetected by both perpetrator...

The present study examined the influence of professor and student characteristics on students’ preconceptions of college professors. Course syllabi for a politically charged social science course were constructed with versions varying by teaching style, professor gender, and professor ethnicity. A total of 633 (44% Latino; 34% African American; 22%...

This article examines the influence of gender, ethnicity (Latino/a or Anglo), and teaching style (lenient or strict) on students' perceptions of professors teaching a social science course. Undergraduates read and responded to a syllabus and rated the course and the instructor on dimensions such as warmth, knowledge, and political bias. Contrary to...

This chapter examines trends in research on gender development. In particular, we highlight some current work on adolescent girls with the goal of informing future research, policy, and program development for adolescent girls. Well before adolescence, girls and boys have definite ideas about what they perceive to be appropriate behaviors, appearan...

The last two decades have been marked by increased attention from scholars, policy makers, and the mass media to girls' needs and experiences. More recently, two developments have contributed to a gender focus that puts boys at the center of popular and academic discourse: recent school shootings and reactions to the research focusing on girls. As...

In recent years an analysis of gender that includes understanding the condition of men and boys in society has garnered considerable attention. We examine four highly promoted pop-psychology books about raising boys. Although such an endeavor could help critically inspect false universalities about gender and examine the ways in which boys and men...

Emotion talk between friends was examined. Women, men, and mixed pairs engaged in an unstructured and self-disclosure conversation. In addition to comparing talk in the two topics, the speech act category, the directness, the experiencer, and the target of the emotion expression were analyzed. As expected, more references to emotion were made durin...

Meta-analyses of 43 published studies comparingadult women's and men's interruptions duringconversations were conducted. Combined significancelevels and combined effect sizes were analyzed. Acrossstudies, men were significantly more likely than womento use interruptions. This difference, however, wasassociated with a negligible effect size (d = .15...

Two sets of meta-analyses of studies examining gender effects on parents' observed language with their children were conducted. One looked at studies comparing mothers and fathers in amount of talking, supportive speech, negative speech, directive speech, informing speech, and questions and requests. The other looked at studies comparing mothers' i...

Same-gender and cross-gender friendships are examined as potential contexts for the development of sodal preferences and skills that may influence the quality of adolescent dating relationships and adult marriages.