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Critical perspectives on "microaggression" research
"The science of microaggressions is not settled."
"When editors fail to encourage all sides of a scientific debate to speak, journal readers may be misled to believe the science is settled. The science of microaggressions is not settled."
"Why a Moratorium on Microaggressions Policies is Needed"
"The idea of microaggression stands at loggerheads with swaths of social and cognitive science... The microaggression field, like much of psychology, lacks diversity of thought, and it shows."
"In the eye of the beholder: Situational and dispositional predictors of perceiving harm in others' words"
"findings from the two studies suggest that microaggressions are truly in the eye of the beholder... microaggression-related training may be detrimental to the very institutions it hopes to enhance... open discourse may be stunted by trainings that make salient for learners the unbeknownst malignancy of their words... although we recognize that some people say mean things with intent to hurt, specific claims that intentional and unintentional slights cause psychological harm are not supported by experimental research"
"Adversarial Collaborations Will Not Solve Society’s Moral Debates"
“'What are the consequences of microaggressions?' In its current form the question is an empirical one, but it is still too broad to be addressed comprehensively... 'Consequences' could refer to an essentially infinite range of outcomes. Even the more specific question, 'Do microaggressions in classrooms impair academic performance?' would be overwhelmingly difficult to answer."
"The Dubious Science of Microaggressions"
"...And that, gentle reader, is how peer-reviewed social science creates myths (much as it has about stereotype threat and implicit bias) about the power of problems that it has not actually established to exist to any substantial degree."
"Are illiberal acts unethical? APA’s Ethics Code and the protection of free speech."
"There has been too little recognition of whether psychological constructs like microaggressions, implicit bias, cultural insensitivity as well as others may unintentionally function to illegitimately infringe upon free speech."
"Diversity is Important. Diversity-Related Training is Terrible."
"Given how weak the literature is demonstrating harm caused by microaggressions (let alone to whom, and under what circumstances), it should not be surprising that there is no systematic empirical evidence that training on microaggressions has any significant or long-term effects on behavior, nor that it correlates with any other positive institutional outcomes."
"Microaggression Research and Application: Clarifications, Corrections, and Common Ground"
Response by Lilienfeld to a critique by Monica T. Williams of his 2017 critique (first link above) of the microaggression research program. (See also the web page for entire issue contents for Williams' response to this piece.)
"The trouble with 'microaggressions'"
"Knowing what we know about the limitations of self-report evidence in psychology, there is no reason to believe perceptions of microaggression are invariably accurate. Instead there is every reason to take seriously the possibility some supposed microaggressions warrant a more innocuous interpretation."
"The Substantial Effect of Microaggressions"
"The term subtle acts of exclusion addresses the problems with the term microaggression—the former focuses on the quality of the incidents (subtle) rather than the size (micro) and their impact (exclusion) rather than their intention (aggression). Because the new term focuses on behavior (acts), it is also more useful for thinking about how you can go about addressing these incidents."
"The Other Crisis in Psychology"
"Another domain in which conflation of correlation with causation may be leading us astray is with microaggressions... I propose that microaggression workshops, to the degree that they are motivated by unwarranted assumptions of the causal impact of microaggressions on mental health, might actually backfire by making at-risk individuals more likely to perceive themselves as microaggressed against... microaggression training may not be preparing people to engage with each other respectfully (as it presumably aspires to), but rather to look for opportunities to take offense in others’ words."
"Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Little Evidence"
Select "View Issue Contents" for commentaries by other psychologists, including one by the founder of the microaggression research program, followed by a reply to them by the author.
"Who is Competent to Decide What Offends?"
"New survey data casts doubt on a popular framework used by universities to identify microaggressions."
"Perceptions of microaggressive behavior across the ideological spectrum"
"[T]he data reported here are indicative of the fact that ‘microaggressions’can be subsumed into the existing literature on motivated social cognition, and support some recent concerns about the widespread adoption of policies designed to counter such interactions on the basis of this traditional conceptualization (e.g., Lilienfeld, 2017)."
"Introductory Psychology: Embracing the Complexities and Controversies"
"The criticisms, similar in some ways to IAT criticisms, include the lack of a clear delineation of what constitutes a microaggression, lack of construct validity, the measurement of the construct, lack of falsifiability, reliance on correlational data, and disconnect from existing psychological science research.".
