Confronting Inequity: How Perceptions of Relative group Advantage vs Disadvantage Shape Reactions to Race-based Disparities.

Jansen, Emma (2026) Confronting Inequity: How Perceptions of Relative group Advantage vs Disadvantage Shape Reactions to Race-based Disparities. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Across three studies, this dissertation examines individual differences and contextual conditions under which people from high-status groups engage with information about structural disparities between groups, how they react emotionally, and how these processes predict support for equity initiatives and policies. Although I expect that the theoretical ideas tested here may extend to instances of inequity between various types of groups (e.g., gender, ethnic, political), I focused specifically on the domain of race-based economic inequities in the United States. In the first empirical chapter, I developed a simple measure of relative racial (dis)advantage perceptions that allowed for a direct comparison of people’s acknowledgement of White advantage and Black disadvantage and quantified the relative gap between the two. Notably, relative racial (dis)advantage perception was consistently one of the strongest predictors of outcome variables like engagement with the topic, support for various equity interventions, and feelings of guilt and sympathy, across all studies. In the next chapter, I examined how malleable the (dis)advantage measure was. After reading about racial inequity, people did increase the magnitude of their relative (dis)advantage perception. This change was primarily driven by adjusting views of how disadvantaged Black Americans were. In the third chapter, I examined the interplay between individuals’ preexisting perceptions of relative (dis)advantage, framing information about inequity as White advantage vs. Black disadvantage, and framing of interventions. Lastly, I investigated whether people were accurate in their predictions of their emotional reaction to reading about racial inequity, or if they would overestimate the intensity of the negative emotions. The results confirmed the latter. Overall, this thesis contributed to the understanding of perceptions of racial inequity and demonstrated their importance, how they change after informational interventions, and how they (do not) interact with (dis)advantage frame manipulations, and showed the relevance of affective forecasting in information and inequity research.

Keywords: disadvantage, advantage, structural racial inequity, affective fore casting, information frames

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Bethany Turner
Date Deposited:	02 Sep 2026 08:56
Last Modified:	02 Sep 2026 08:56
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104383
DOI:

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