Valerie Purdie Greenaway

Last updated

Valerie Purdie Greenaway
Born
Valerie Joyce Purdie
NationalityAmerican
Other namesValerie Purdie-Vaughns
Alma mater
Spouse Joseph A. Greenaway Jr.
Scientific career
FieldsSocial Psychology
Institutions Columbia University
Thesis Identity Contingency Threat: The Impact of Circumstantial Cues on African-Americans’ trust in diversity settings (2004)
Doctoral advisor Claude Steele
Website psychology.columbia.edu/content/valerie-purdie-greenaway

Valerie Purdie Greenaway, who has also published under the surnames Purdie-Vaughns and Purdie, [1] is an American social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Columbia University. [2] Her research interests include diversity, stereotypes and intergroup relations. [3] She is one of the first African Americans to receive tenure in the academic sciences at Columbia University, and is credited with coining the term "intersectional invisibility". [4]

Contents

Education and career

Purdie Greenaway grew up in Brentwood, New York. [5] She attended Columbia College for her undergraduate education, where she also played varsity basketball. [3] [5] After finishing at Columbia in 1993, she spent a few years working at the I Have A Dream Foundation, where she worked on summer camp programs and mentoring for underserved third grade students. [1] [5] An interest in better tracking her students' progress led her back towards psychology, and she spent three years working as the lab manager for Geraldine Downey. [5] She then went on to receive her PhD from Stanford University in 2004, studying under Claude Steele. [2] Her thesis was titled Identity Contingency Threat: The Impact of Circumstantial Cues on African-Americans’ trust in diversity settings.

Upon completing her PhD program, Purdie Greenaway accepted a position at Yale University as psychology faculty. She worked there as an assistant professor until 2009. She then started a position at Columbia University, eventually becoming an associate professor and director of a laboratory group in the psychology department in 2014. [1] [2] [6]

Purdie Greenaway was also a research fellow for Columbia's Institute for Research on African-American Studies. [6] She served as core faculty for the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program, which was discontinued in February 2017. [7]

Research

Purdie Greenaway's laboratory group uses an interdisciplinary approach to study a wide range of topics that assess how social groups and human behavior interact. [6] [8] Some of the lab's research topics include social identity threat, dialogues regarding historic injustice, and racial health disparities. [8]

Intersectional invisibility

Purdie Greenaway's article with Richard P. Eibach, "Intersectional Invisibility: The Distinctive Advantages and Disadvantages of Multiple Subordinate-Group Identities", has been cited over 850 times, according to Google Scholar. [9] This article is significant for giving name to the psychological concept of intersectional invisibility. [10] This concept posits that individuals with multiple subordinate-group or non-prototypical identities tend to be overlooked. The subordinate-group member is rendered invisible through mechanisms such as historical narratives, cultural understandings, interest group politics, and legal frameworks. [10] Researchers give an example of African-American women; Because they do not fit the prototype of their subordinate group identities (white and male), they experience "intersectional invisibility" (378). [10] Purdie Greenaway and Eibach wanted to move away from the notion that one group suffers more than others and instead gain a better understanding of how an individual's identities interact to inform their whole experience. Their theory borrows from previous literature regarding "double jeopardy" which refers to the disadvantages associated with individuals who are part of more than one subordinate group.

Seeing Black

In 2004, Purdie Greenaway along with Jennifer Eberhardt, Phillip Goff and Paul Davies published "Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [11] Researchers conducted five studies to determine how salience to stereotypes might affect visual processing for their sample of both police officers and civilians. Previous literature has demonstrated how racial bias affects participants' judgement-making processes, specifically relating Blacks with crime (876). [11] In the present study, researchers found a bidirectional association between criminality and Blacks. [11] Studying the effects of such associations can prove helpful in eliminating racial profiling and improving police officer and civilian interactions.

Status-based rejection model

In 2002, Purdie Greenaway and colleagues proposed a model of status-based rejection and its implications in their journal article, "Sensitivity to Status-Based Rejection: Implications for African American Students’ College Experience." [12] The concept of rejection sensitivity was developed by another team of researchers to indicate how rejection can influence an individual's relationships with others. Purdie Greenaway and her colleagues looked at this cognitive process as it relates to African Americans attending predominantly White educational institutions. [12] The first two studies conducted were to effectively develop a questionnaire that measures the construct of race-based rejection sensitivity. The RS–Race Questionnaire (RSQ–Race) for African Americans has subsequently been used in other psychological literature as a measure of racial expectations and beliefs. The third study utilized the questionnaire with a sample of African American college students. Their results indicated that higher levels of rejection sensitivity were related to perceiving a negative race-related experience or NRE. [12] The findings of this research can be instrumental for African American college students' academic success and overall well-being.

Selected publications

Impact

Purdie Greenaway's work extends well outside the boundaries of academic scholarship. She has consulted for corporations such as Ernst & Young and nonprofit organizations such as Teach for America. [13] In 2018, she presented at the Tory Burch Foundation's first Embrace Ambition Summit. [14]

Personal life

Greenaway is married to former United States Circuit Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr. [15]

Related Research Articles

The term "minority group" has different usages, depending on the context. According to its common usage, the term minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half, is a "minority’. Usually a minority group is disempowered relative to the majority, and that characteristic lends itself to different applications of the term minority.

In the psychology of self, one's self-concept is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question "Who am I?".

The out-group homogeneity effect is the perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members, e.g. "they are alike; we are diverse". Perceivers tend to have impressions about the diversity or variability of group members around those central tendencies or typical attributes of those group members. Thus, outgroup stereotypicality judgments are overestimated, supporting the view that out-group stereotypes are overgeneralizations. The term "outgroup homogeneity effect", "outgroup homogeneity bias" or "relative outgroup homogeneity" have been explicitly contrasted with "outgroup homogeneity" in general, the latter referring to perceived outgroup variability unrelated to perceptions of the ingroup.

Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group. It is theorized to be a contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender gaps in academic performance. Since its introduction into the academic literature, stereotype threat has become one of the most widely studied topics in the field of social psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">In-group and out-group</span> Sociological notions

In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. People may for example identify with their peer group, family, community, sports team, political party, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or nation. It has been found that the psychological membership of social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of phenomena.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social rejection</span> Deliberate exclusion of an individual from social relationship or social interaction

Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes interpersonal rejection, romantic rejection and familial estrangement. A person can be rejected or shunned by individuals or an entire group of people. Furthermore, rejection can be either active, by bullying, teasing, or ridiculing, or passive, by ignoring a person, or giving the "silent treatment". The experience of being rejected is subjective for the recipient, and it can be perceived when it is not actually present. The word "ostracism" is also commonly used to denote a process of social exclusion.

Empathy-altruism is a form of altruism based on moral emotions or feelings for others.

Susan Tufts Fiske is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.

Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.

VUCA is an acronym based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, to describe or to reflect on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations. The U.S. Army War College introduced the concept of VUCA in 1987, to describe a more complex multilateral world perceived as resulting from the end of the Cold War. More frequent use and discussion of the term began from 2002. It has subsequently spread to strategic leadership in organizations, from for-profit corporations to education.

Benevolent prejudice is a superficially positive prejudice that is expressed in terms of positive beliefs and emotional responses, which are associated with hostile prejudices or result in keeping affected groups in inferior positions in society. Benevolent prejudice can be expressed towards those of different race, religion, ideology, country, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Attributional ambiguity is a psychological attribution concept describing the difficulty that members of stigmatized or negatively stereotyped groups may have in interpreting feedback. According to this concept, a person who perceives themselves as stigmatized can attribute negative feedback to prejudice. This can lead stigmatized group members to feel uncertainty about whether negative outcomes are due to discrimination against them or their own behavior. In comparison, they might discredit positive feedback as a form of sympathy rather than seeing it as the result of their ability and achievement. The term was coined by Melvin Snyder, Robert E. Kleck, Angelo Strenta, and Steven J. Mentzer in 1979 before being popularized by Jennifer Crocker, Brenda Major and their colleagues in the 1990s.

Relationship contingent self-esteem (RCSE) is a type of self-esteem that derives from the outcomes, process, and nature of one's romantic relationship. Like other types of contingent self-esteem, it is generally linked with lower levels of self-esteem and well-being. It can be unhealthy for the relationship because it paves the way for excessive bias for negative interpretations of relationship events. Past research has shown that relationship-contingent self-esteem is independent of feelings of commitment to one's relationship, closeness to one's partner, and satisfaction in the relationship. Also, this research showed that it was linked to “obsessive immersion or preoccupation” with the romantic relationship.

Mark Richard Leary is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. His research has made significant contributions to the fields of social psychology and personality psychology.

Intergroup relations refers to interactions between individuals in different social groups, and to interactions taking place between the groups themselves collectively. It has long been a subject of research in social psychology, political psychology, and organizational behavior.

Monica Rose Biernat is a social psychologist known for her research on social judgment, stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas.

Felicia Pratto is a social psychologist known for her work on intergroup relations, dynamics of power, and social cognition. She is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Pratto is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Eberhardt has been responsible for major contributions on investigating the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime through methods such as field studies and laboratory studies. She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery and judgment affect culture and society within the domain of social justice. The results from her work have contributed to training law enforcement officers and state agencies to better their judgments through implicit bias training. She has also provided directions for future research in this domain and brought attention to mistreatment in communities due to biases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Axes of subordination</span>

In social psychology, the two axes of subordination is a racial position model that categorizes the four most common racial groups in the United States into four different quadrants. The model was first proposed by Linda X. Zou and Sapna Cheryan in the year 2017, and suggests that U.S. racial groups are categorized based on two dimensions: perceived inferiority and perceived cultural foreignness. Support for the model comes from both a target and perceivers perspective in which Whites are seen as superior and American, African Americans as inferior and American, Asian Americans as superior and foreign, and Latinos as inferior and foreign.

Social identity threat is a theory in social psychology derived from social identity theory to explain the different types of threats that arise from group identity being threatened as opposed to personal identity. This theory distinguishes between four distinct types of social identity threats: categorization threat, distinctiveness threat, threats to the value of social identity, and acceptance threat. Each type is associated with particular social contexts that make the threats more or less likely to occur. This theory emphasizes how the level of commitment with the social identity shapes the nature of the threat experienced.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Valerie Purdie Greenaway. Retrieved December 7, 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 "Valerie Purdie Greenaway | Department of Psychology". psychology.columbia.edu. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  3. 1 2 Kinney, Sinead. "Valerie Purdie Greenaway, PhD". NeuroLeadership Institute. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  4. "Valerie Purdie Greenaway". runner. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Tonti, Alexis. "Beating Bias". Columbia College Today. Retrieved December 7, 2019.
  6. 1 2 3 "Valerie Purdie Greenaway | Laboratory of Intergroup Relations and the Social Mind | Columbia University". www.columbia.edu. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  7. "The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars - About". www.healthandsocietyscholars.org. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  8. 1 2 "About | Laboratory of Intergroup Relations and the Social Mind | Columbia University". www.columbia.edu. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  9. "Citations for "Intersectional Invisibility: The Distinctive Advantages and Disadvantages of Multiple Subordinate-Group Identities"". Google Scholar. Retrieved December 7, 2019.
  10. 1 2 3 Purdie-Vaughns, Valerie; Eibach, Richard P. (September 1, 2008). "Intersectional Invisibility: The Distinctive Advantages and Disadvantages of Multiple Subordinate-Group Identities". Sex Roles. 59 (5–6): 377–391. doi:10.1007/s11199-008-9424-4. ISSN   0360-0025. S2CID   35469591.
  11. 1 2 3 Eberhardt, Jennifer L.; Goff, Phillip Atiba; Purdie, Valerie J.; Davies, Paul G. (2004). "Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 87 (6): 876–893. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.87.6.876. ISSN   1939-1315. PMID   15598112. S2CID   6322610.
  12. 1 2 3 Mendoza-Denton, Rodolfo; Downey, Geraldine; Purdie, Valerie J.; Davis, Angelina; Pietrzak, Janina (2002). "Sensitivity to status-based rejection: Implications for African American students' college experience". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 83 (4): 896–918. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.4.896. ISSN   0022-3514. PMID   12374443.
  13. Kinney, Sinead. "Valerie Purdie Greenaway, PhD". NeuroLeadership Institute. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  14. Ohikuare, Judith. "The Tory Burch Foundation Wants Women To Own Their Ambition". www.refinery29.com. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  15. Greenaway, Joseph A. (May 1, 2020). "Joseph A. Greenaway Jr. Lecture Series on Law and Justice Speak at Your Own Peril". British Journal of American Legal Studies. 9 (1): 1–15. doi: 10.2478/bjals-2020-0007 . S2CID   219779654.