title: Understanding affirmative action.
abstract: Affirmative action is a controversial and often poorly understood policy. It is also a policy that has been widely studied by social scientists. In this review, we outline how affirmative action operates in employment and education settings and consider the major points of controversy. In addition, we detail the contributions of psychologists and other social scientists in helping to demonstrate why affirmative action is needed; how it can have unintended negative consequences; and how affirmative action programs can be most successful. We also review how psychologists have examined variations in people's attitudes toward affirmative action, in part as a means for testing different theories of social behavior.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA. fjcrosby@ucsc.edu
authors.forename: Faye J
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Crosby
authors.forename: Aarti
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Iyer
authors.forename: Sirinda
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sincharoen
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D011640:Public Policy; D012935:Social Justice / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D014481:United States