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Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
0027-8424
1091-6490
National Academy of Sciences

39231209
202415057
10.1073/pnas.2415057121
qnasQnAs30
QnAs
QnAs with Laura E. Wallace
Hardcastle Matthew
4 9 2024
10 9 2024
4 9 2024
121 37 e24150571212024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
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pmcOrganizations, including corporations, religious institutions, colleges and universities, and nonprofits, are often eager to acknowledge or celebrate their past histories and accomplishments. However, the historical context of structural racism in the United States means that such celebrations can carry negative connotations for some members, particularly among Black Americans. In a recent PNAS article (1), Laura E. Wallace, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and her colleagues explored the effect of organizational history celebrations on the sense of belonging among Black Americans.

Laura E. Wallace. Image credit: Mark Temelko (Roman Family Center for Decision Research).

Across four online studies involving a total of around 2,000 Black respondents in the United States, the authors presented participants with simulated webpages of companies. Participants who viewed webpages containing celebrations of a company’s past anticipated a reduced sense of belonging at the company and expressed lower intentions to apply to the company, compared with participants who viewed websites without such historical celebrations. This negative association was observed even when organizational histories did not include explicit references to historical marginalization. In contrast, simulated companies celebrating a history of having Black employees in leadership positions were not associated with this negative effect. PNAS spoke with Wallace about her research.

PNAS: What was your inspiration for this research?

Wallace: In general, my coauthors and I are interested in understanding factors that undermine belonging among underrepresented groups. Stephanie [Reeves] and I were sitting in a talk. In the talk, they were showing that when female engineering students encounter physical environments that are filled with pictures of old White men, as is really common in engineering buildings, it can make them feel like they don’t belong (2). And Stephanie and I looked at each other, and we said, “Are the pictures necessary?”

It has resonated with some experiences that we had had where we felt like we were a part of organizations that were celebrating history, and it had felt like a signal that the organization didn’t care as much about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It was the combination of having had experiences like this that resonated personally with watching this talk, that made us think, “Could we take this one step further?”

PNAS: In your article, you identified social identity threat as a potential side effect of organizational history celebrations. What is social identity threat, and how might it be triggered by celebrations of organizational history?

Wallace: Social identity threat happens when people feel that, based on some identity that they have, they are going to be devalued (3). Anybody can experience this, but it’s particularly common among people from groups that are commonly negatively stereotyped in our society. Because of those societal stereotypes, people from those groups often are concerned that they’re going to be devalued in a particular setting.

One of the big ideas in the social identity threat literature is the cues hypothesis (4). The cues hypothesis is the idea that there are features in the environment that can trigger these concerns about being valued, about belonging, and those cues can happen regardless of whether people in that environment are personally prejudiced. It doesn’t require people in an organization, for example, to be personally racist or personally sexist, in order for Black Americans or women to feel like they’re not valued there. Our work identifies organizational history celebrations as one of these threatening cues.

PNAS: Can you walk us through your experimental approach for this article?

Wallace: In all of these studies, we recruited Black Americans. We told them we were interested in their impressions of a company, and we showed them ostensible screenshots of a company’s website. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions. In one condition, the organization celebrated its history. They talked about, “Here’s a story about our founder. He was so hard-working. We try to bring these historical values into the present.” In the other condition, there wasn’t any mention of history. It was really just about celebrating the present successes of the company. After our participants viewed the pages of the website, they then reported how much they thought they would belong at the organization as well as how interested they were in submitting an application for a job at the organization.

We initially thought that these effects might only happen when there was a hint that this organization had a racist past. In the first study, we told participants in both the control and the experimental conditions that the organization had been founded in the [US] South, and we showed them an old photo of White men who were the ostensible founders of the organization. We thought this might be a cue that the organization had a racist past.

In later studies, we actually removed those cues, and we still observed that in a condition where the organization really celebrated its history through its mission statement and through comments from people in the organization, Black Americans felt like they wouldn’t belong, and they were less interested in joining the organization. The way we interpret that is just that historical racism was so pervasive that any company is likely assumed to have a history of racism.

PNAS: Did you directly query the study participants on their concerns about racism?

Wallace: We were interested to know whether participants would spontaneously generate concerns about racism that were consistent with our theorizing. We just asked them, at the end of the study, “Do you have any impressions of the company that you would like to share?” About half of the participants across our studies left some sort of comment.

What we found was that, when the organization had celebrated their history, participants were more likely to mention concerns about racism in the organization. They were saying things like, “I want to believe that when this organization is celebrating their history, they’re just drawing on values like hard work, but all of this talk of tradition reads like old ways, like racism.”

PNAS: What are your next steps in this research?

Wallace: We started this work with Black Americans because we had the strongest intuition that organizational history celebrations would have this negative effect, but our hypothesis extends to other groups that have been historically marginalized. I’m interested, going forward, in examining these effects among women in STEM fields, for example, or among LGBTQ Americans. There are also populations that are relatively newly discriminated against or have a history of being discriminated against that is not as true in the present. So, I think, there are important theoretical questions to understand who exactly this extends to.
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1 L. E. Wallace, S. L. Reeves, S. J. Spencer, Celebrating organizational history triggers social identity threat among Black Americans. Proc. Nalt. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 , e2313878121 (2024).
2 M. K. McCarty, J. R. Kelly, K. D. Williams, The impact of fleeting exposure to female exemplars of success in STEM. Group Processes Intergroup Relat. 25 , 474–488 (2022).
3 C. M. Steele, S. J. Spencer, J. Aronson, “Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, M. P. Zanna, Ed. (Academic Press, 2002), pp. 379–440.
4 M. C. Murphy, C. M. Steele, J. J. Gross, Signaling threat: How situational cues affect women in math, science, and engineering settings. Psychol. Sci. 18 , 879–885 (2007).17894605
