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Publications
* indicates graduate student authors | † indicates shared first authorship
Jurcevic, I., Danbold, F., & Unzueta, M. M. (2026). From Threat to Challenge: Addressing Resistance to Diversity Through Holistic Diversity Previews and Tools.” Public Administration Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.70152.
Support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a core public value and central to public administration. Yet, as diversity is realized through shifts in employee representation, organizational norms, and implementation practices, some members of socially privileged groups (e.g., White employees, men) experience discomfort and anxiety in intergroup interactions and perceive status or resource threat. This creates a gap between diversity-as-communicated (how organizations communicate the benefits and relevance of DEI to the public sector) and diversity-as-experienced (how public employees with privileged identities experience the implementation of diversity efforts), reducing employee engagement with diversity efforts and slowing implementation in public organizations. Integrating a multidisciplinary foundation, we propose a framework to increase socially privileged group participation by reframing diversity as a challenge to meet rather than a threat to avoid. We outline practical strategies to build DEI implementation capacity in public organizations while remaining anchored to public values and equity commitments.
Jurcevic, I., & Trawalter, S. (2025). Black and White Americans' Perceptions of Community Equity Efforts Diverge Following the Removal of Confederate Monuments. Social Psychological and Personality Science. pdf.
Communities across the United States are removing Confederate monuments from public spaces. Little work, however, has considered downstream consequences of these decisions. Across three experiments and four replications in Supplemental Material, we examine impacts of community decisions on individuals’ perceptions of communities’ efforts toward racial equity. We find that the removal of monuments leads White Americans—but not Black Americans—to believe that communities will sufficiently prioritize policies aimed at redressing racial inequity in the future. Taken together, these findings suggest that the symbolic removal of Confederate monuments may signal different structural equity investments to different constituencies, with Whites anticipating that communities will engage in sufficient racial equity policy efforts and Black Americans remaining skeptical.
*Bak, H., Jurcevic, I., & Trawalter, S. (2024). What Black People Value When White People Confront Prejudice. The Journal of Social Psychology. pdf.
Previous research in psychology has focused on how confronting racial prejudice affects White people – White perpetrators and bystanders – and reduces their prejudice. We shift the focus to Black people – Black people targeted by prejudice and Black observers – and examine how Black people perceive White people’s confrontations. Two hundred forty-two Black participants evaluated White participants’ responses to anti-Black comments (i.e., confrontations), which were text-analyzed and content-coded to identify the characteristics that Black participants valued the most. Analyses revealed that Black participants valued confrontations that were coded as direct, targeting the action, labeling the prejudiced action as such, and connecting individual acts of prejudice to systemic racism. Notably, this style of confrontation is not what research suggests is best for White people, for reducing Whites’ prejudice. Accordingly, the present work contributes to our understanding of confronting prejudice and the value of centering Black experiences and perspectives rather than White comfort and prejudice.
Crosman, K. M., Jurcevic, I., *van Holmes, C., Hall., C. C., & Allison, E. H. (2022). An Equity Lens on Behavioral Science for Conservation. Conservation Letters. pdf.
In recent decades, interest in and application of behavioral insights to conservation theory and practice have expanded significantly. Yet the growth of integrated strategies to adapt and guide human behavior in service of conservation outcomes has included limited engagement with questions of equity and power. Here we examine the use of behavioral approaches in conservation efforts, emphasizing potential misapplications that may result from omitting equity and power considerations. Such omission may lead to an overemphasis on the role of individual behaviors relative to system-level drivers of biodiversity loss, result in misalignment between behavioral interventions and the actual drivers of behavior in situ, and incur unanticipated negative social welfare and distributional costs, all of which may undermine conservation success. We offer recommendations for centering equity when applying behavioral insights to conservation, including strategies for high-level agenda setters (scholars, advocates, funders and programmatic leaders) as well as conservation practitioners. The urgent need for biodiversity conservation is insufficient reason to side-step equity and power considerations; we contend that centering equity is consistent with this urgency and key for developing sustainable conservation theory and practice
**Awarded Best Behavior and Environment Studies of 2022 Paper by Rare
Hall, C. C.† & Jurcevic, I.† (2022). Behavioral Insights for Public Policy: Recentering Our Science. Cambridge Elements Series: Applied Social Psychology. pdf
There has been an increasing effort to integrate behavioral insights into public policy. These insights are often reliant on social psychological research and theory. However, in this relatively young field, policy interventions and behavioral insights are often built on laboratory-based psychological research, with effects that can prove to be unstable in the “real world.” In this Element, the authors provide a brief history of how behavioral insights have been applied to complex policy problems. They describe ways in which behavioral insights have been successful and where they have fallen short. In addition, they examine unintended negative consequences of nudges and provide a more nuanced examination of their impacts on behavior change. Finally, the Element concludes with a set of recommendations for generating more effective practical applications of psychology to the field of public policy.
Jurcevic, I., Wong, L. H., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Shapiro, J. R. (2021). Strategies for disclosing a concealable stigma: Facts and feelings? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. pdf
Disclosing a concealable stigma has the potential for both positive outcomes, such as receipt of social support, and negative outcomes, such as being the target of prejudice. Identifying a disclosure strategy that minimizes prejudice while increasing the likelihood of social support can build theory regarding the underpinnings of stigma and provide guidance to those with concealable stigmas. Across three experiments, we tested a theory-driven disclosure strategy (perceiving emotional content vs. purely factual content) for stigmatizing conditions that elicit sympathy or disgust. These experiments (N = 363) revealed that for disgust-eliciting stigmas, disclosing with feelings in addition to factual information leads to higher social support, compared to only disclosure of factual information. We tested and replicated this effect across disclosure of both medical and physical health conditions. This research advances our theoretical understanding of disclosure of stigma and offers pragmatic and implementable suggestions for stigma disclosure.
Jurcevic, I., & Fyall, R. (2020). Does a Business-Like Approach to Diversity in Nonprofit Organizations Have a Chilling Effect on Stakeholders? Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 2(2), 1-17. pdf
Despite widespread commitment to promoting diversity in the nonprofit sector, increasing diversity poses a continued challenge for many nonprofits. Even nonprofits with explicit diversity statements often struggle to diversify their organizations. One potential impediment to achieving diversity may result from the framing and communication of diversity values within nonprofits. We evaluate the reactions of hypothetical stakeholders to two forms of diversity framing – instrumental and moral frames – focusing on potential divergence amongst racial-minority and White perspectives. Experiment 1 demonstrates that Black and Latino participants feel marginally more dehumanized and anticipate racial minorities will feel more devalued in an organization espousing the moral (compared to instrumental) diversity frame. In contrast, Whites feel less valued, more dehumanized, and perceive organizations as less authentically dedicated to diversity when viewing an organization that espouses the instrumental (compared to moral) frame. Experiment 2 extends these results demonstrating that Whites who are particularly concerned about their place in future job markets are more likely to feel devalued by instrumental frames to diversity. We discuss how these results diverge from existing findings of similar frames applied to business, rather than nonprofit, contexts. These findings extend our understanding of the implications of outcome-oriented versus moral frames within nonprofit organizations as well as informing understanding of how diversity frames may offer divergent signals to underrepresented and non-underrepresented stakeholders.
Jurcevic, I., & Trawalter, S. (2016). Is Donald Trump making White Americans racist? Virginia Policy Review.
Many left-leaning pundits, policymakers, and citizens are wondering whether Donald Trump is racist. Others are less concerned with whether the candidate is racist, but question whether his candidacy is giving already-racist Americans an outlet to express their long-held prejudices. Here we ask a different—and arguably more consequential—question: Are Donald Trump’s messages increasing White Americans’ racism? Decades of research in social psychology has identified three key contributors to prejudice and intergroup conflict: categorization, realistic threat, and symbolic threat. We argue that these catalysts can be found throughout Donald Trump’s comments.
Kaiser, C. R., Major, B. N., Jurcevic, I., Dover, T. L., Brady, L. M., & Shapiro, J. R. (2013). Presumed fair: Ironic effects of organizational diversity structures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(3), 504 – 519. pdf
This research tests the hypothesis that the presence (vs. absence) of organizational diversity structures causes high-status group members (Whites, men) to perceive organizations with diversity structures as procedurally fairer environments for underrepresented groups (racial minorities, women), even when it is clear that underrepresented groups have been unfairly disadvantaged within these organizations. Furthermore, this illusory sense of fairness derived from the mere presence of diversity structures causes high-status group members to legitimize the status quo by becoming less sensitive to discrimination targeted at underrepresented groups and reacting more harshly toward underrepresented group members who claim discrimination. Six experiments support these hypotheses in designs using 4 types of diversity structures (diversity policies, diversity training, diversity awards, idiosyncratically generated diversity structures from participants’ own organizations) among 2 high-status groups in tests involving several types of discrimination (discriminatory promotion practices, adverse impact in hiring, wage discrimination). Implications of these experiments for organizational diversity and employment discrimination law are discussed.