Research Statement
The Politics, Activism, Culture, & Threat (PACT) lab engages undergraduate scholars to consider how different sources and types of threats affect social justice movements at the individual, group, community, corporate, and policy levels. The types of threats we face can be concrete (e.g., your job or livelihood) or symbolic (e.g., your culture, values, and history). These threats have serious consequences for how we imagine others (through dehumanization and restrictions) and how we understand issues of the past (memorials), present (prisons), future (unionization), and imaginary (policy proposals). Using various methods and novel designs, the PACT lab seeks to examine the causes and consequences of social justice through a political psychological lens.
The Individual Level: How does perceived threat impact our support for human rights, and support for who?
Individuals state that they support human rights, but when threatened, they are more than willing to restrict them (Carriere et al., 2022). In the face of threat, we are willing to be wiretapped, we consent to the torture of suspected terrorists, and we limit the presentation of religious symbols in public places (Carriere et al., 2018, 2019). However, the size of the effect of threat on human rights support was unclear. An Honors student, Anna Hallahan, and I conducted a meta-analysis on the relationship between threats and human rights restrictions. The meta-analysis showed a medium-sized effect on restrictions of civil liberties when facing all types of threats (Carriere et al., 2022). More importantly, it revealed that the effects of perceived threat were much larger for the rights of outgroup members than of ingroup members.
Together with a sophomore undergraduate scholar, we made the case that the ingroup is defined by citizenship (Geedy-Gill & Carriere, 2023). Using a novel framework, we examined the degree to which individuals were willing to exchange their rights for a security guarantee. By looking at their value tradeoffs, we found that citizens were willing to give up about 18% of their own rights but 32% of non-citizens’ rights in the ‘name of security’. This is a harrowing result that raises several implications for our policy decisions involving migrants and other non-citizens at the border. Trinity went on to lobby our local representative in my policy class on issues related to immigration.
The Group Level: How do we translate our feelings of threat into dehumanization of political opponents, and can we disrupt the perpetuation of meta-perceptions?
Outgroup interactions are built not simply on how threatening we perceive that group, but also how we perceive that group perceives us - our meta-perception of the outgroup. These meta-perceptions are highly inaccurate and lead to further dehumanization and prejudice. If a Democrat believes “All Republicans think Democrats want to steal their guns”, and then they are presented with someone who says “I am a Republican and I strongly disagree that Democrats want to steal our guns” -- what do we think about this person, compared to individuals who strongly agree?
With two undergraduates, we show that disrupting these meta-perceptions can decrease dehumanization but it fails to increase future intent to interact (Carriere et al., 2024). We also analyze their messages to their partner, utilizing sentiment analysis to describe the kinds of language used when meta-perceptions are disrupted. This novel design of introducing an atypical other to disrupt a meta-perception had not been seen in the literature until our publication, which was supported with funding from the Institute for Humane Studies. I am currently writing up another publication with a Washington & Jefferson student and a colleague, where we are discussing her Capstone and Senior Thesis projects in examining how sex role essentialism moderates gender identity to predict support for providing menstrual products in public schools (Carriere et al., under review). The new attack line on Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz makes her research highly topical and exciting and was driven by her own personal passion in the issue.
The Community Level: How do we use symbolic resources to remember the past, make sense of the present, and change the future?
Across groups, we use symbolic resources to create larger meanings and symbols of our historical pastimes and memories. We raise a clenched fist to symbolize the constant struggle of workplace equity (Carriere, 2020). We use fictional stories to make comparisons to current day social justice issues (Carriere, 2018a, 2018b). And we construct monuments to remind us of the injustices of lives lost and the struggle for rights still to come. But are all monuments equal? A memorial of a man on a horse seems to evoke a different psychological response than those who visit the infinity waterfall of the 9/11 Twin Towers Memorial or walk the uneven paths of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE). My collaborators and I believe that there should be a theoretical difference, but no investigation had ever answered this question.
One of my Senior Thesis students examined over 158,000 Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews of various memorials worldwide. She investigated whether these more ‘experiential memorials’ (9/11, MMJE) evoke quantitatively different sentiments compared to the more ‘standard memorials’, and found that we can use the text in the reviews to predict which type of memorial they are talking about (Mulderig et al., accept pending minor revisions).
Recently, our lab received funding from Division 48 (Peace & Conflict) to investigate dark historical reenactments, such as the Moore’s Ford Lynching, which challenge the narrative of racial progress in America. We will measure participants’ beliefs in racial equality both before and after viewing either the dark reenactment of Moore’s Ford or the standard reenactment of Gettysburg. We hope to show that these dark reenactments can serve as powerful counter-narratives that resist the whitewashing of history and provoke critical reflection on racial injustice.
The Corporate Level: How do companies engage with human rights and social justice movements, and do we trust their intentions?
Corporate interests also have a stake in activism around the distribution and support of human rights. Do consumers reward companies that simply hang a #BlackLivesMatter poster, or do companies need to engage in true substantial change to show their support for human rights? One of my students, Madison Will, won the Psychology’s department nomination for best research paper in the sciences studying exactly this question. She showed that consumers treat hanging a poster as equivalent to not taking any action at all, and that consumers only rewarded structural change actions due to the mediating belief that the company cared about the social issue (Will & Carriere, 2023). Other students have replicated this finding using a more neutral social justice condition of workplace mental health (Marshall & Carriere, 2024). There are still many research questions to be explored in the future, including considering how the size of the corporation and the comparative cost of their actions may moderate this relationship.
The Policy Level: How can we adjust systemic policies to be more aware and open to the most vulnerable, and how can we consider dehumanization in an intersectional way?
Social justice for human rights requires serious consideration of the systemic issues and policies that are enacted to limit some and free others. In my newest book, I propose that psychology’s ability to highlight the individual story is the true meeting of politics, public policy, and psychology (Carriere, 2022). Drawing from my post-doctoral work on Capitol Hill, I argue that there needs to be a re-centering under which policy takes place – away from the politicians and towards the staffers and public servants who work (too hard) to understand the science behind it all. In the end, it is the story of the individual – the tangible experience – that drives policy. This development of cultural-political psychology - a framework that combines my theoretical grounding in cultural psychology alongside my experimental work within political psychology - is a novel space of true theoretical and policy-relevant research and have begun publishing with collaborators from Brazil and India on this topic (Carriere, Tuli et al., in press; Carriere, Chaudhary, et al., in press).
One policy-relevant area I am concerned with is the carceral system. While research can describe the public-facing predictors of imprisonment – what predicts your entry and re-integration – the minimal research on life in the systemic focuses primarily on violence within prison (both self-inflicted and other-aimed). Reviewing current research on incarceration through the lens and expansion of dehumanization, a student and I highlight how such research perpetuates the dehumanization of a population of people stripped of their rights, the majority of whom carry multiple minority identities. In our review, we use psychological science to provide concrete policy recommendations on issues such as sub-minimum wages, costs of fees, access to healthcare, and the need to focus on the mental and physical wellbeing of a people that remains woefully understudied (Carriere & Ravn, 2024).
New Directions: Union Support Research
Building on these foundations, my lab has recently begun to explore the psychological predictors of union support in the United States. Our research with colleagues from New York suggests that while general support for unions is high, it varies significantly based on political ideology and system-justifying beliefs (Flores-Robles et al., under review). We are particularly interested in the "Not in My Workplace" effect, where individuals express support for unions in principle but resist unionization in their own workplaces. This summer, a student learned a coding language (Twine) and developed a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experimental paradigm to further investigate this phenomenon, allowing participants to navigate workplace scenarios and decide about unionization in a controlled, immersive environment.
Conclusion
My work focuses on uncovering how people respond to perceived threats in both beneficial and detrimental ways. As my research program builds, I will explore how social justice is negotiated at each level of analysis - the individual, the group, and society. My research is broad enough to engage various undergraduate scholars, topical enough to gain their interest, and narrow enough to ensure that their work is meaningful enough to warrant publication.