As America grows more diverse and less Christian over the years, the question of what to say in holiday greetings becomes increasingly important. This package of studies examines how different levels of specificity in mentioning other cultures than the (current) dominant Christian culture impacts participant felt inclusion and how important they think diversity is to the presented organization (Granz & Rios, In Prep).

In this line of work, I work with collaborators to investigate different ways to reduce intergroup bias. Projects so far have varied in type of bias (e.g., racism, sexism), context (e.g., educational training), and technique (e.g., interpersonal confrontation, construal; Burns & Granz, 2020, 2021).

A substantial amount of research has been done on non-target (e.g., White, Straight, Male) people's perceptions of ally behaviors, and some other work has been done on target (e.g., non-White, LGBTQ, Female) people's perception of non-target groups. However, less work has been done on how non-target group members should support target group social movements, as well as how those behaviors are then perceived by the target group members. Further, my collaborators and I identify mechanisms to predict what influences perceptions of ally behaviors (Burns & Granz, 2022).

For each group of people, there are numerous terms/names that can be used to label them. We often assume that these labels carry the same weight and meaning, and they indeed may mean the same thing by dictionary definition, but little empirical work has been done to assess the direct and indirect, downstream impacts of the semantic differences in label meanings. I've studied this in terms of labels for lower income people (Granz & Burns, Under Review)

Political correctness can be defined as the avoidance of language that would exclude, marginalize, or insult minority group members. While this is certainly a noble pursuit, it is not met without backlash by some people.  I have worked with collaborators to investigate whether the resistance to societal changes are due to direct bias against a target group or any of a number of other factors, finding that the reason for some groups' reluctance to accept change is their attitude against political correctness. We've studied this in reference to the retiring of Native American Mascots (Burns, Granz, & Williams, 2022) and removal of Confederate Statues (Burns, Granz, & Williams, 2024).