DEI May INCREASE Surface-Level Divisions, Hurt Information Elaboration
DEI gets things the wrong way around. Again.
Does DEI actually work?
That’s the main question that drives my research, but I’ve had to stop asking people in the DEI field. DEI departments and DEI “specialists” have a vested interest in maintaining and proliferating DEI. I put specialists in quotations because there’s no standard practice or certification for how to do DEI unlike medicine, law, psychology, or scientific research. And DEI activists, like many activists, are more concerned with changing the world than understanding it. I won’t go into detail about the myriad deflections, denials, dishonest debates, cognitive dissonance, and sometimes outright hostile responses that typically arise when you challenge the DEI orthodoxy. Suffice it to say, it’s not pretty and none of it answers my main question: does DEI work?
On the other side of the culture war, there are opinions ranging from “DEI doesn’t work right now, but it could if we do it differently” to “DEI is literally communism,” and all the well-reasoned, empirically supported evidence you can imagine in between. However, the latter usually involves debunking Woke leaps in logic that “support” DEI, the harm and injustice caused by DEI programs, or rigorous debates against an aggressive, often smug, DEI advocate. What many of these cases don’t do is look at academic research on the subject.
I understand why. DEI critics assume that academic articles on DEI are dogmatically pro-DEI, leading to biased research from the outset. And, for the most part, they’re right. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve come across that start from the conclusion that DEI is good. Most treat DEI as if it is the new Ten Commandments and anyone who doubts this new holy trinity is a heretic.
However, there is some research that investigates things like diversity in an intellectually honest manner, and it would benefit the DEI conversation to add these findings to the discussion.
Let’s start with diversity, the most ingrained of the trinity. Although equity and inclusion both have individual issues we need to examine, diversity ties into both of them, so we’ll start there. Equity refers to forced outcomes for “diverse” people and inclusion refers to the inclusion of “diverse” people. DEI initiatives are not trying to force outcomes or include people who are straight, white, or male.
One of the biggest problems with diversity begins at the most fundamental level: its definition. Most diversity research and initiatives focus on surface-level diversity, which according to Harrison et al, means “overt biological characteristics typically reflected in physical features.”
Why does most DEI focus on this? There are several reasons, including the misguided idea that we judge each other more by what’s on the outside than the inside, the proliferation of critical theory, and the belief that reversing MLK’s injunction to judge each other by the content of our characters rather than the color of our skin is necessary to achieve racial justice.
However, in the less-biased literature, the importance of surface-level diversity rests on 3 main theories: the similarity-attraction paradigm, the contact hypothesis, and the social categorization perspective. I’ve already pointed out the problems with the way diversity initiatives treat the first two theories in a different article, so today I’ll focus on the third.
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