Addressing Stigmatizing Environments to Reduce Sexual Minorities’ Health Disparities

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences

In the last two decades, the United States has been a stage for significant increase in equality for the LGBTQ community as seen by the legalization of same-sex marriage, progress in HIV prevention and treatment, medical support for eradicating conversion therapy, among other advances. However, according to research by Jes L. Matsick, Britney M. Wardecker, and Flora Oswald in “Treat Sexual Stigma to Heal Health Disparities: Improving

Bridging the Socio-Economic Divide in the Era of Covid

We’ve been told for eons that to get ahead you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Not really, according to new research in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Data show, and 83 percent of Americans agree, that higher education is essential and “one of the most robust routes out of poverty,” Wendy R. Williams and Harmony A Reppond write in “More Than Just Hard Work: Educational Policies to Facilitate Economic Mobility.”

Yet in the world of

Biased? Probably.

January 22, 2021

Ever left an Airbnb without waving a friendly good-bye to the hosts?  If you’re white, probably no big deal.  If you’re Black, well the hosts may have thought you were trying to hide something.

New research in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences uses this scenario and others as examples of implicit bias based on a person’s “category,” such as race or gender.

Often people are not aware their impressions of someone are rooted in

Database of Police Outcomes May Be First Step to Reduce Racial Bias

January 21, 2021

Not only are black people more likely than white people to be stopped by police, but new research in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences documents that the darker you are, the more likely you are to be shot.

Conversely white people with very white skin are less likely to have force used against them.  “Whiteness serve(s) as a protective factor,” Kimberly Barsamian Kahn and Karin D. Martin explain in “The Social Psychology of Racially Biased