Pick your perspective: Racial group membership and judgments of intent, harm, and discrimination

How do people judge the intentions of a perpetrator and the harm experienced by a victim in cases of racial discrimination? How do these judgments influence attributions to discrimination? We examined these questions in 4 studies, predicting that Whites’ and Blacks’ judgments would reflect different group-based perspectives. Supporting our hypotheses, White authors describing an arrest denied intent and ignored harm relative to Black authors (Study 1). When judging whether an event was discrimination, Whites were influenced by intent, but Blacks were influenced by intent and harm (Study 2). Finally, instructing people to take the victim’s perspective increased Whites’ judgments of intent, harm, and discrimination (Studies 3 and 4), while Blacks’ judgments generally remained the same (Study 4). Our results demonstrate one reason why Whites and Blacks judge discrimination differently—they adopt different perspectives when evaluating intent and harm—and offer a way to increase Whites’ recognition of discrimination: perspective-taking