Academic Appointments


2020-21 Courses


All Publications


  • The affirmed (White) teacher in a cross-race context SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION Brady, S. T., Griffiths, C., Cohen, G. L. 2023
  • ?Can you tell me more about this??: Agentic written feedback, teacher expectations, and student learning CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Griffiths, C., Murdock-Perriera, L., Eberhardt, J. L. 2023; 73
  • God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy. Journal of personality and social psychology Roberts, S. O., Weisman, K., Lane, J. D., Williams, A., Camp, N. P., Wang, M., Robison, M., Sanchez, K., Griffiths, C. 2020

    Abstract

    In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is conceptualized as a White man predicts the extent to which White men are perceived as particularly fit for leadership. We found support for this across 7 studies. In Study 1, we created 2 measures to examine the extent to which U.S. Christians conceptualized God as a White man, and in Study 2 we found that, controlling for multiple covariates (e.g., racist and sexist attitudes, religiosity, political attitudes), responses on these measures predicted perceiving White male job candidates as particularly fit for leadership, among both Black and White, male and female, Christians. In Study 3, we found that U.S. Christian children, both White and racial minority, conceptualized God as more White than Black (and more male than female), which predicted perceiving White people as particularly boss-like. We next found evidence to suggest that this phenomenon is rooted in broader intuitions that extend beyond Christianity. That is, in a novel context with novel groups and a novel god, U.S. Christian adults (Studies 4 and 6), atheist adults (Study 5), and agnostic preschoolers (Study 7), used a god's identity to infer which groups were best fit for leadership. Collectively, our data reveal a clear and consistent pattern: Attributing a social identity to God predicts perceiving individuals who share that identity as more fit for leadership. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

    View details for DOI 10.1037/pspi0000233

    View details for PubMedID 31999155

  • Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Voigt, R., Camp, N. P., Prabhakaran, V., Hamilton, W. L., Hetey, R. C., Griffiths, C. M., Jurgens, D., Jurafsky, D., Eberhardt, J. L. 2017

    Abstract

    Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police-community trust.

    View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.1702413114

    View details for PubMedID 28584085