From triple quandary to talent quest: The past, present, and future of A. Wade Boykin's contributions to psychology.

A. Wade Boykin's scholarship has provided key insights into the psychological realities of racially minoritized people and catalyzed revolutionary changes in psychology and education. Combining insights from personal and research experiences, Boykin authored the foundational triple quandary (TQ), a framework describing how Black Americans must navigate the often conflicting values and priorities of dominant mainstream society, the heritage culture of Black communities, and dynamics associated with being racially minoritized. TQ describes the unique developmental challenges faced by Black children, for whom misalignment between home cultural socialization and U.S. schooling often leads to pathologizing mischaracterizations of their attitudes and behaviors, resulting in chronic academic opportunity gaps. Boykin used his training as an experimental psychologist to empirically test the validity and explanatory utility of the TQ framework and to determine whether Black cultural values could be leveraged to improve student learning. Focusing on cultural values such as expressive movement, verve, and communalism, studies with his collaborators consistently supported Boykin's framework and predictions for improving Black student achievement-related outcomes. Beginning in the early 2000s, Boykin and his colleagues began to scale the lessons of decades of empirical work into the talent quest model for school reform. The TQ and talent quest continue to evolve in their application, as scholars and practitioners have found them relevant to a diverse range of minoritized populations in American society and beyond. Boykin's work continues to bear on the scholarship, career outcomes, and day-to-day lives of many scholars, administrators, practitioners and students across disciplines and institutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Constructs, Tape Measures, and Mercury.

This is a Lewinian-field-theory approach to understanding the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in the context of racism to contribute to the debate about whether graduate schools should remove GRE scores from admissions processes. Woo and colleagues (this issue) review the empirical literature on bias from a psychometric perspective. In this commentary, I challenge the definition of the underlying construct measured by the GRE and offer alternative definitions of what is measured. Next, drawing on an analogy from genome-wide association studies, I discuss how genomic models predicting height that are trained on data from European ancestral populations systematically underpredict the height of West Africans. Our access to data from tape measures, and their correlation with height, provide objective opportunities to audit our prediction. I discuss the implications of this when the criterion variable for validating the GRE is first-year grades. I then probe an analogy used by Woo and colleagues in which they assert that blaming the GRE for disparities in scores across groups is akin to blaming the thermometer for global warming. I describe racism as context for a field-theory approach to thinking about the limitations of this misguided analogy. Finally, I suggest pathways forward.

On the prevalence of racial discrimination in the United States.

Boutwell, Nedelec, Winegard, Shackelford, Beaver, Vaughn, Barnes, & Wright (2017) published an article in this journal that interprets data from the Add Health dataset as showing that only one-quarter of individuals in the United States experience discrimination. In Study 1, we attempted to replicate Boutwell et al.'s findings using a more direct measure of discrimination. Using data from the Pew Research Center, we examined a large sample of American respondents (N = 3,716) and explored the prevalence of discrimination experiences among various racial groups. Our findings stand in contrast to Boutwell et al.'s estimates, revealing that between 50% and 75% of Black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents (depending on the group and analytic approach) reported discriminatory treatment. In Study 2, we explored whether question framing affected how participants responded to Boutwell's question about experiencing less respect and courtesy. Regardless of question framing, non-White participants reported more experiences than White participants. Further, there was an interaction of participant race and question framing such that when participants were asked about experiences of less respect or courtesy broadly, there were no differences between non-White participants and White participants, but when they were asked about experiences that were specifically race-based, non-White participants reported more experiences than White participants. The current research provides a counterweight to the claim that discrimination is not a prevalent feature of the lives of minority groups and the serious implications this claim poses for research and public policy.

Reducing negative affect and increasing rapport improve interracial mentorship outcomes.

Research suggests that interracial mentoring relationships are strained by negative affect and low rapport. As such, it stands to reason that strategies that decrease negative affect and increase rapport should improve these relationships. However, previous research has not tested this possibility. In video-chats (Studies 1 and 2) and face-to-face meetings (Study 3), we manipulated the degree of mutual self-disclosure between mentees and mentors, a strategy that has been shown to reduce negative affect and increase rapport. We then measured negative affect and rapport as mediators, and mentee performance (quality of speech delivered; Studies 1 and 3) and mentor performance (warmth and helpfulness; Studies 2 and 3) as key outcomes. Results revealed that increased self-disclosure decreased negative affect and increased rapport for both mentees and mentors. Among mentees, decreased negative affect predicted better performance (Studies 1 and 3). Among mentors, increased rapport predicted warmer feedback (Studies 2 and 3). These effects remained significant when we meta-analyzed data across studies (Study 4), and also revealed the relationship of rapport to more helpful feedback. Findings suggest that affect and rapport are key features in facilitating positive outcomes in interracial mentoring relationships.