American society is commonly perceived as having a longstanding commitment to inclusion, equality, and fairness that fueled the heavy investment in “diversity” that was ubiquitous in higher education, among corporations, and in the culture writ large until recently. Yet, while organizational diversity practices were nearly universally adopted and enjoyed heavy financial investment, anti-black bias remained significant in American society and most White Americans opposed social movements such as Black Lives Matters that were explicitly mobilizing to improve conditions for Black Americans. Our research team scrutinized the factors undergirding White Americans’ support for diversity in higher education to help explain this conundrum. In particular, we asked whether the manner in which diversity was commonly embraced in the U.S. might ironically resonate with hierarchy-maintaining attitudes that stand to perpetuate rather than disrupt the status quo.

Specifically, we scrutinized the reasons people and organizations provide for why it is important to value diversity, termed their “diversity rationales.” Diversity rationales can be classified according to how instrumental and how moral they are. Instrumental rationales argue that diversity is good due to the benefits being inclusive can provide. In higher education, common instrumental arguments include that diversity improves students’ cognitive outcomes, fosters innovation, and enhances workplace readiness. Importantly, these benefits implicitly flow primarily to the parties tacitly charged with being inclusive, such as majority-group members and/or the institutions they have disproportionate influence over and access to. As university leaders from Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania spelled out in a 1978 Bakke v. Regents of California amicus brief, they pursued the educational benefits of student diversity “not only or even primarily to confer benefits upon members of minorities” but, rather, to improve educational outcomes. Moral rationales, on the other hand, embrace diversity due to intrinsic values or take diversity itself as such a value. Common moral rationales embrace diversity out of a concern for fairness or justice. Regardless of the principle, moral rationales, critically, do not promise a material return for being inclusive. 

The two rationales have several implications beyond their definitional differences. Compared to moral rationales that come across as particularly strong commitments to diversity that are focused on historically marginalized groups, instrumental rationales project a diversity commitment that tends to be perceived as relatively weak as well as more inclusive of and beneficial for majority group members. Though the two can co-occur, instrumental rationales have come to dominate the legal, corporate, and higher education landscapes. 

In conversation with leaders and practitioners in higher education, two interrelated possibilities emerged as explanations for instrumental rationales’ predominance. First, particularly reflective admissions officers discussed with us that taking our survey prompted them to realize that their decision to embrace instrumental rationales reflected how their teams unwittingly centered majority group members’ preferences and outcomes. Indeed, the data from the study showed that as a whole our sample of admissions officers both reported greater uptake of instrumental rationales compared to moral rationales and expected that instrumental rationales would be preferred by and work to benefit White (and not Black) students. This raised the possibility that instrumental rationales proliferated in part because of people’s motivation to benefit the majority group or maintain a status quo characterized by majority group advantage. 

Second, in several instances, university leaders responded that universities were constrained in their actions by legal precedent regarding race-conscious policies. There was significant cause for this claim. From the 1978 Bakke case up until the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions case, the Supreme Court had upheld that only instrumental (and not moral) arguments were compelling defenses for race-conscious university admissions policies (i.e., affirmative action). 

So we devised a series of studies that assessed whether hierarchy-maintaining attitudes undergirded White Americans’ preferences for instrumental over moral rationales. Further, we assessed whether these same attitudes might feature in the judgments and arguments of legal actors to center White Americans’ interests in the law governing how universities might value diversity.

Data & Results

Hierarchy-enhancing attitudes can take many forms. They can look like prejudice, in which people report feeling less warmth toward Black compared to White Americans or conceive of Black Americans as having less of the characteristics needed to be a good and productive member of society. They can look like endorsing principles that society should be hierarchical, that people are not fundamentally equal, or that people get what they are justly due in society. Or they can look like concrete policy positions opposed to race-conscious remedial policies (e.g., affirmative action), concern that valuing diversity hurts White students, or a belief that progress for Black Americans necessarily comes at a cost for White Americans.  

In Studies 1 & 2, we enrolled 1101 White Americans to share the reasons why they thought it was or might be important for a university to value diversity. We analyzed those reasons for how instrumental and moral they were and also measured participants’ policy, principle, and prejudicial attitudes. We find that the more participants provided instrumental over moral diversity rationales, the more strongly they endorsed a wide array of hierarchy-enhancing attitudes. In Study 3, we enrolled 197 White Americans in an experiment that strengthened these conclusions: participants preferred an instrumental university diversity statement over a moral one because they felt it more greatly resonated with their values and outlook on diversity and because they thought it would be more beneficial to White Americans. They felt the moral rationale would be more beneficial to Black Americans but, as in Studies 1-2, this assessment did not factor into their rationale preference one way or the other. 

In Studies 4 & 5 we recruited judges and lawyers, respectively, and had them engage with the arguments made in the 1978 Bakke case. We asked judges how likely they would be to find each of the four moral arguments and sole instrumental argument presented in Bakke to be compelling legal defenses for affirmative action if they could rule according to their own wishes, without being constrained by precedent or the possibility of being overturned by a superior court. Then we measured judges’ principle beliefs and policy positions. We asked lawyers how likely they would be to use each of the 5 Bakke arguments as a function of their beliefs about judges’ principle, policy, and prejudice attitudes. We report evidence suggesting that some judges' embrace of instrumental over moral defenses for affirmative action corresponds with a heightened preference for hierarchy, as with our lay samples in Studies 1-2. Further, in some cases, lawyers leaned more strongly on instrumental compared to moral defenses to the extent that they believed judges would be concerned that universities valuing diversity hurt non-underrepresented groups such as White students. Together, these findings suggest that there may be a recursive cycle in the dynamic between the judges’ biases and lawyers’ anticipation of those biases that can center White Americans’ interest in the law governing how universities are allowed to value diversity.

Implications

Though embracing diversity might seem to signal egalitarian values, our work demonstrates that the most common way of doing so–for instrumental more than moral reasons–actually resonates with anti-egalitarian attitudes that stand to perpetuate a status quo that advantages majority groups. This fact provides a potential explanation for why diversity had been so widely embraced by White Americans, taken up by corporations and universities, and for half a century protected by federal law.  Democratic societies pass civil rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action laws to shield minority groups from the “tyranny of the majority.” The current work highlights how such efforts are challenged by the dynamic nature of group dominance, whereby dominant group interests can come to drive even those efforts crafted to challenge its very dominance.