Research
Despite increasing and transformative levels of racial diversity, racial discrimination continues to pervade almost every arena of American life. Our research examines how dynamic changes to the United States’ contemporary racial landscape have impacted the ways in which racial discrimination occurs, when, and why.
We are particularly interested in exploring how discrimination manifests distinctly for different racial and ethnic groups, how dominant group members response to growing diversity, and the social conditions that build or disrupt solidarity among marginalized groups.
Click on the bolded pdf link to read the full article.
2020 - Present
Zou, L. X. & Ngum, S. (2025). Status- and foreignness-based discrimination experiences shape feelings of similarity among people of color. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. (pdf) (osf)
Goh, J. X.*, Lei, R. F.*, & Zou, L. X.* (2023). Positioning Asian Americans in social cognition. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. (pdf)
Craig, M. A., Zou, L. X., Bai, H., & Lee, M. (2022). Stereotypes about political attitudes and coalitions among U.S. racial groups: Implications for strategic political decision-making. Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin. (pdf)
Zou, L. X., & Cheryan, S. (2022). Diversifying neighborhoods and schools engender perceptions of foreign cultural threat among White Americans. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. (pdf)
Semrow, M., Zou, L. X., Liu, S., & Cheryan, S. (2020). Gay Asian Americans are perceived as more American than Asian Americans who are presumed straight. Social Psychological and Personality Science. (pdf) (osf)
Figure 1 from Zou & Cheryan (2022). Stimuli from the experimental condition depicting the projected population growth of different racial and ethnic groups in White participants’ local communities.
2010 - 2019
Zou, L. X., & Cheryan, S. (2017). Two axes of subordination: A new model of racial position. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (pdf)
Zou, L. X., & Cheryan, S. (2015). When Whites’ attempts to be multicultural backfire in intergroup interactions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. (pdf)
Zou, L. X., & Dickter, C. L. (2013). Perceptions of racial confrontation: The role of color blindness and comment ambiguity. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. (pdf)
Figure 3 from Zou & Cheryan (2017). The two-dimensional model based on participants’ ratings of racial and ethnic groups.
More About Our Research
Cover photo for article by Efrén Pérez on Washington Post, “The U.S. is more racially diverse than ever. Will people of color unify politically?”
Photo credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post
White flight may still enforce segregation (APA, October 2021)
What Anti-Asian Discrimination Teaches Us About Racism (Behavioral Scientist, October 2021)
Brief Conversations About Intergroup Relations with Dr. Jordan Axt (Youtube, August 2020)