Organizational and Individual Health, Behavior, and Psychology

Introduction BIPOC communities face many structural barriers to accessing mental health care. To reduce this health disparity and better serve multicultural populations, many providers are turning to person-centered care. Person-centered care is intended to improve quality of care by centering the patient’s values, preferences, and goals in collaboratively designed care plans. Although this approach has…

Introduction School discipline policies and practices disproportionately affect Black students, who are more likely to be suspended or expelled compared to their white peers. Studies have shown that these disciplinary disparities are linked to levels of racial bias, and reflect disproportionate use of such practices on Black students. Black students are then differentially processed for…

Introduction Members of advantaged racial groups have historically denied or minimized the existence of racial inequality in the United States and other countries. Existing research has extensively analyzed the incentives and motivations behind why advantaged racial groups resist acknowledging the existence or scale of racial inequality. Some of those motivations include fear of losing privileged…

Introduction Existing research indicates that Black, Indigenous, and people of color have worse health outcomes than white people, including incidence, prevalence, severity of disease at diagnosis, rates of mortality, and lower quality of care, despite efforts to close these gaps. The health disparity gap begins at birth and persists throughout one’s life course. Though these…

Introduction Prior research has documented that sharing demographic characteristics increases a sense of understanding or empathy between two people. This in-group bias has been found to influence the decisions made by leadership teams, inspection enforcers, teachers, and judges to favor those with shared racial or gender traits (further exasperated by white racial power). Greenwood, Hardeman,…

Introduction As recent as 2015, implicit bias has dominated our national conversation around racism and discrimination. It’s been said, ​for example​, that implicit bias is what led officer Betty Shelby to shoot Terrance Crutcher, an unarmed Black man, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2016. When less lethal acts of discrimination occur in schools and in the workplace,…

Introduction Often, our intentions conflict with how we behave. These gaps between our intentions and actions can influence many social issues, including discrimination. For example, an organization may espouse racial equity but hire a white candidate over an equally qualified candidate of color. In response to disparities caused by unintentionally biased behavior, some researchers have…

Introduction Scholarship has examined many forms of racism, but research on how racism impacts individuals’ everyday experiences is still developing. Some scholars have studied how racism can be internalized by members of oppressed groups. For example, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s famous experiment presenting Black children with Black and white dolls continues to be referenced…

Introduction “Implicit bias is like the smog that hangs over a community,” ​Hidden Brain​ podcast host Shankar Vedantam said on an episode about implicit racial bias. “It becomes the air people breathe.” Indeed, like air, implicit racial bias and discrimination is everywhere, and has been linked to poorer health and success outcomes for historically marginalized groups. To…

Introduction Medical professionals recognize that physicians must learn both the science of medicine and the art of patient communication. Currently, much of the medical field is focused on the concept of “cultural competency” and “cultural humility.” These concepts have pushed medical education to move beyond “colorblindness” and recognize that social factors, such as race, ethnicity,…