These results highlight the complex and often counterproductive impacts of pedagogical elements and themes prevalent in mainstream DEI training.
Given both the lack of rigorous research on diversity initiatives and the documented potential of DEI efforts backfiring, a better assessment of the efficacy and effects of contemporary diversity training is warranted.
Conclusion: A Self Reinforcement Process Model for Anti-Oppressive DEI Interventions.
The evidence presented in these studies reveals that while purporting to combat bias, some
anti-oppressive DEI narratives can engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion,
prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence
for a transgression deserving punishment. Although not addressed in the studies reported herein, it is also
possible that these factors are mutually reinforcing and spread through social contagion. Our findings raise
this possibility which we offer here in the form of a post-hoc process model (to be investigated in future
studies):
1. Anti-Oppressive Intervention: DEI training rooted in anti-oppressive rhetoric introduces
narratives that lead people to assume that certain groups are inherent oppressors and others
as inherent victims.
2. Increased Racial Suspicion: Exposure leads to hostile attribution bias, causing participants
to see discrimination when there is no evidence that discrimination has occurred, driving racial
prejudice, intergroup hostility, suspicion and division.
3. Authoritarian Policing: This heightened suspicion triggers authoritarian policing tendencies,
leading people to endorse surveillance and purity testing, strict social controls, and escalating
responses from corrective to coercive.
4. Punitive Retribution: Participants show greater support for extreme punitive measures
against perceived oppressors as well as those seen as ideologically impure.
5. Calls for More Interventions: The heightened punitive atmosphere feeds back into demands
for more anti-oppressive DEI training, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of suspicion and
intolerance.
Taken in its entirety, this research demonstrates a pressing need for data-driven pressure testing of DEI
interventions to examine potential harms. In spite of the serious consequences we outline above, DEI
offerings have no independent, scientific review board for objective evaluation and no standards of
transparency for the materials themselves. Offerings at major corporations for example, were nearly
impossible to collect because these materials are not publicly available, and thus the full implications and
spread of potentially harmful content is currently impossible to examine.
This research raises critical questions about how many individuals, as a result of these programs, have
experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment. The hostile attribution
bias revealed in NCRIâs study appears readily transmissible by the DEI pedagogy above, much of which is
inserted into recommended or mandatory readings and trainings that are widely adopted at present. This
suggests the potential for a far broader scope of harm than previously considered, underscoring the
urgency of rigorous evaluation of anti-oppressive, DEI interventions to identify unintended and damaging
consequences, and, ultimately, to prevent them
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf
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