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Microaggressions have received increasing attention in recent decades because, although individually they may seem minor, they are hypothesized to have significant harmful psychological and social effects in aggregate. However, correct usage of the term “microaggression” is contested; authors across disciplines defend a variety of inconsistent ...

Microaggressions, as defined by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, are “the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (Sue 20...

Early scales developed to measure experiences of everyday racial discrimination employ an interpersonal schema of the racial discrimination construct (e.g, McNeilly 1996; Williams 1997; Krieger et al. 2005). For example, the Perceived Racism Scale conceives of racial discrimination as “a belief or attitude that some races are superior to others a...

Debates about racism and calls for racial equality have recently surged. This shift is reflected in the EU’s expansion of its anti-discriminatory policies to include race and ethnicity as categories. To determine the extent of racial/ethnic discrimination and the success of ‘positive action’ measures, the EU recommends the collection of stati...

How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity doesn’t really have much intuitive normative pull on...

There remains no consensus amongst social scientists as to how to quantify and understand forms of information deprivation such as misinformation. Measures of information deprivation typically employ a deficient conception of truth that should be replaced with measurement methods grounded in certain idealized norms of agreement about what kind of i...

Like Austin’s “performatives”, some models are used not merely to represent, but also to change their targets. This paper argues that Austin’s analysis can inform model evaluation: if models are evaluated with respect to whether they are adequate for particular purposes (Parker 2020), and if performativity can sometimes be regarded as a mod...

Social oppression is generally understood to be “structural”: formal and informal rules and common patterns of interaction cause disparate and inequitable outcomes for members of certain social groups. However, it is common—especially in psychology and some philosophical subfields—for work to focus narrowly on features of individuals or int...