[1] A large amount of scientific literature in social psychology studies diversity ideologies as prejudice reduction strategies, most commonly in the context of racial groups and interracial interactions.
It is consistently shown that diversity ideologies influence how individuals perceive, judge and treat cultural outgroup members.
[2] Beyond intergroup consequences, diversity ideology also has implications on individual outcomes, such as whether people are open to cultural fusion and foreign ideas, which in turn predict creativity.
Research suggests that polyculturalism has mostly positive implications for intergroup attitudes, but given the novelty of this ideology, further exploration of its full spectrum of effects is needed.
Social identity theory posits that people have a natural tendency to identify with groups based on common social identity, and due to the motivation to maintain positive distinctiveness, people display ingroup favoritism, i.e. giving preferential treatment to ingroup versus outgroup members in evaluations and behaviors.
This literature reflects the core value of colorblind ideology, i.e. de-emphasizing group memberships in order to improve intergroup attitudes.
[15] On the other hand, other researchers argue that while assimilation promotes a unitary cultural ideal by the dominant standard and requests conformity and submission, colorblindness as a diversity ideology is intended to promote a larger whole with which everyone identifies and to facilitate equal treatment of majority and minority group members.
Research shows that the adoption of colorblindness by majority groups is associated with external motivation to control prejudice as it serves the purpose of ego protection.
[20] When anti-egalitarian White participants were exposed to intergroup threat, they used colorblindness to rationalize inequality and legitimize the racial status quo.
The colorblind ideology is also found to suppress expression of explicit prejudice in the short term, especially when intergroup conflict is high and more threat is triggered in the dominant group.
Therefore, trying to consciously suppressing bias against outgroups and negativity in intergroup interactions can impair majority group's cognitive ability and executive functions.
[28][29] As a result, inducing majority group members to adopt a colorblind ideology and to ignore racial differences in intergroup interactions, which leads them to consciously exert to appear non-prejudiced, can paradoxically increase their tendency to express more negative attitudes and discriminate against minority groups.
Majority group members can exhibit more negative nonverbal behaviors and be perceived as less friendly by their minority interaction partners.
Colorblindness is associated with reduced awareness of racism and sensitivity to microaggressions as well as reports of them among majority group members.
[23][24] Minority groups' psychological engagement in the workplace increases when working with colleagues who endorse multiculturalistic attitudes, an effect mediated by the perception of reduced intergroup bias.
However, after being exposed to an "all-inclusive multiculturalism" message that intentionally frames the dominant group as being part of the diversity, the automatic pairing becomes slower.
[41] As two major competing diversity ideologies, multiculturalism and colorblindness are frequently studied together to contrast their effects on intergroup interactions and attitudes.
In one of the first set of studies directly comparing multiculturalism and colorblindness, researchers found that in the colorblind condition with a message of how intergroup harmony can be achieved by focusing on a superordinate identity and treating every individual as unique, participants were more likely to exhibit prejudice and ethnocentrism but less likely to display stereotyping of minority groups, as compared to the multiculturalism condition with a message stressing how diversity is valuable and group differences should be recognized.
[25] Compared to colorblindness, multiculturalism is also associated with greater collective self-esteem, such as identification with and sense of belonging to the ingroup, for minority groups.
All cultures and people are conceptualized as the products of historical and contemporary interactions among many different groups, and deeply interconnected by intersecting histories.
[46][47] When dominant group participants endorsed polyculturalism more, they had less negative attitudes towards the LGBTQ community and less sexual prejudice.
[48][3] As a downstream consequence, research finds that polyculturalism fosters creativity on problems that emphasizes cultural integration, an effect driven by greater propensity for foreign idea inclusion.
Polyculturalism might lead group members to perceive that the cultural traditions and attributes valued by and unique to their respective ingroup as de-emphasized.
As the study of this ideology is in an early stage, the weaknesses of polyculturalism and how it might incur backlash await further examination.