Project Mentor: Professor Debbie Laible, Psychology
Project Description:
How are racial supremacist beliefs passed down through generations?
The goal of the research is to examine the factors that lead to White adolescents acquiring racist, extremist, or egalitarian beliefs. We have conducted a variety of studies to explore the family processes that lead to adolescents acquiring biased attitudes and beliefs (or the opposite) regarding race. Over the past couple of years, we have been collecting survey data from conservative White parents and adolescents in order to understand how beliefs about White nationalism get transmitted. We are now hoping to move this work into the lab and have parents and adolescents come into the lab and discuss current events regarding race, gender, and politics to examine how these values get transmitted from generation to generation through discourse.