When the subject of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) initiatives comes up, many privileged individuals, especially heterosexual white men often question how they will benefit from such an initiative. During an interview with

The


Sunday Times

, American best-selling novelist James Patterson, who has an estimated net worth of roughly $800 million, said that white men face “another form of racism” and are having a harder time obtaining writing jobs in film, television and publishing.

Comments such as Patterson’s are not uncommon in the wake of cross-industry diversification efforts. Because diversity initiatives most often target underrepresented groups, such as women or ethnic/racial minorities, members of non-target groups, such as white men, may pick up unintended messages that things are getting harder for them because they do not fall into these targeted categories. But are members of the majority really losing in the rise of diversity initiatives?

The data shows a different picture: in 2020, seven in ten authors signed by Hachette (the press Patterson works with) were white. Such diversity metrics are common in the publishing industry. Up to 95% of books published by five major publishing houses between 1950 and 2019 were written by white authors, according to a

New York Times

investigation. In a response to Patterson’s comments, two-time

New York Times

bestselling author Frederick Joseph expressed the sentiment that coming “from a black man who has had over 50 rejections of books (all of which are now bestsellers) because white editors do not understand them or ‘already have Black male authors’… shut up.”

Zero-sum beliefs — the idea that one must benefit directly at the expense of others — may be key to understanding why diversity initiatives are backfiring among majority group members. Zero-sum beliefs tend to be more pervasive in our thinking than we might realize. People tend to see profits as zero-sum, driving them to falsely believe that more profitable companies are less socially responsible. People also tend to believe that government policies cannot benefit one group without harming another, making many reluctant to support international trade and immigration policies.

Perhaps more surprisingly, people can develop negative attitudes toward policies that are merely framed as “diversity policies.” In a series of experiments, Professor Drew Jacoby-Senghor at Berkeley Haas School of Business and his Ph.D. student Derek Brown studied whether framing a non-zero-sum policy as ‘diversity’ (versus ‘leadership’) policies would change White Americans’ perception of how the policy would affect their racial group. They informed participants of a hypothetical new policy that would increase admission slots for students of all racial backgrounds, including white applicants. The proposed policy was either framed as a “Diversity Leaders Program” or a “Promising Leaders Program.” Participants then answered how they thought the initiative would affect white applicants’ likelihood of admission to the school. They found that when the policy was framed as intending to increase diversity, white participants incorrectly believed that the proposed policy would harm white applicants by decreasing their chances of getting into the institution. In fact, they found that for majority group members, receiving equal benefits with non-majority members is simply not enough. Zero-sum perceptions go away only when white participants learned that they benefit more from the policy initiative relative to non-white applicants. Even when policies lack a diversity framing (i.e., ‘leadership’ policies), so long as white participants were told that among the 50 additional admission slots that were added, a greater proportion of the additional slots tend to go to minority applicants (such that there are greater relative benefits to members of minorities), they would misjudge the policies as harmful to white people.

Moreover, people tend to think that others’ success comes at their own expense, but not the other way around, according to researchers Russell Roberts of Chicago Booth School of Business and Shai Davidai of Columbia Business School. Asymmetric beliefs about our own and others’ losses are accentuated especially when we feel threatened by others’ success. The more threatened we feel by their success, the more likely we tend to believe that it comes at our own expense, but not vice versa. People who did not feel threatened by others’ successes were able to see relative gains and losses more accurately. They were more likely to correctly perceive both parties as equally prone to gain or lose.

If zero-sum thinking makes it worse, how do we encourage a more inclusive world without eliciting discomfort and backlash from the majority? A number of researchers are looking at finding ways that will maximize positive intergroup consequences of diversity initiatives. For example, Taylor Ballinger and Jennifer Crocker, researchers at The Ohio State University, suggest that using a multicultural diversity framing that includes the majority group, instead of a colorblind framing, would relieve the extent to which whites feel excluded or threatened by diversity policies. When group differences were not narrowly defined to exclude whites, multicultural diversity initiatives were not found to have backfired and prompted feelings of exclusion among non-Hispanic white American participants. The findings suggested that even things that seem as little as the framing of a policy are relevant to the eventual outcome.

Despite knowing how prone we are to zero-sum thinking, we should avoid concluding that the answer is to shy away from all diversification efforts. Identifying an effective way to communicate and implement diversity initiatives — one that effectively increases the inclusion and representation of underrepresented groups without evoking negative reactions in high-status groups — is very much relevant to the effectiveness of diversity initiatives. An effective diversity initiative may be one that channels people away from thinking and conceptualizing the world in zero-sum terms and one that helps us reimagine ourselves as creators and contributors who collaborate to expand the boundaries of possibilities.