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Abstract
Cultural forces and individual cognition share a recursive relationship: they shape each other. Although basic and applied research has examined racism and prejudice in the U.S. in recent decades, how white culture, norms, and values pervade our thinking and shape our attitudes remains understudied. This project investigates what constitutes white cultural values in the U.S., which I argue uphold whiteness as the norm in the U.S. Using mixed methods in this dissertation, I create and validate a scale to assess the psychological construct of white cultural values. The first study (n = 12) in this dissertation used qualitative methods, relying on standpoint theory, to gather data from one-on-one in-depth interviews conducted with People of Color about their critical perspectives of whiteness in the U.S. Study 2 (n = 200) employed a different qualitative method of open-ended responses to gather responses from a wider demographic of U.S. residents’ perspective on cultural values and norms, which included White U.S. residents. These two studies served as the basis for the generation of data-driven scale items and led to the creation of a large set of items that capture white cultural values. This large inventory of items was ultimately tested in Study 3 (n = 414 participants) to conduct exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the novel scale. Together, these three studies led to a validated white cultural values scale. This validated scale has the potential to further our understanding of how endorsement of these racialized values might be upholding structural disparities in various domains. Utilizing this novel measurement tool in different domains and contexts (e.g., education) could uncover the psychological processes that play a role in social environments being systemically unjust.