Someone in the office makes a racially insensitive comment, and a white co-worker asks a Black colleague to help correct the offender.

Teamwork makes the dream work, right? Well, not always.

In three studies, a group led by an ILR School researcher found that this kind of maneuver can backfire. In such scenarios, the marginalized person then views the person who asked for their help less favorably – and is less likely to want to associate with them in the future.

“A marginalized person’s willingness to get involved in confronting prejudice is much more complicated than simply just trying to reduce prejudice in the workplace,” said Merrick Osborne, assistant professor of organizational behavior in the ILR School. “Oftentimes it is asking them to do work, and it can put a burden on them. We find that, for marginalized people, being asked by an ally to speak up against a prejudice confrontation is more emotionally burdensome than not being asked. In turn, that shapes how the ally is viewed.”

Osborne is a co-author of “A (Costly) Penny for Your Thoughts? Allies Cause Harm by Seeking Marginalized Group Members’ Help When Confronting Prejudice,” published Dec. 17 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Osborne’s co-authors are Eric Anicich, associate professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California; and Cydney Dupree, associate professor of organizations and innovation at University College London.

This work was part of Osborne’s doctoral thesis at USC, where Anicich was his adviser; the pair met Dupree when she gave a talk at USC in 2021.

In the early days of the Black Lives Matter and other movements, Osborne noticed that members of marginalized groups were being called on to comment about sensitive issues – such as the police killing of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 – just because of their membership in the group, and not because of any particular expertise.

“I thought that was really interesting,” Osborne said. “We social scientists haven’t fully unpacked how marginalized people experience addressing prejudice within the workplace, and there’s an assumption that marginalized folks have more knowledge about prejudice and how to reduce it.

“This assumption isn’t unfounded,” he said, “but what I wanted for this research was to play out that scenario a step further: What happens when marginalized people are actually asked to speak up?”

Osborne and his team devised three studies to test whether such requests heighten the marginalized person’s emotional burden, and whether they would shape a marginalized group member’s perception of the ally. The three studies involved nearly 1,500 participants.

In study 1, participants described an act of workplace prejudice (either sexism or racism) and evaluated an ally co-worker who either hypothetically sought or did not seek their help while confronting it. Study 2 tested the effects of ally help-seeking in various scenarios, including invoking the name of the marginalized person but not directly seeking their help; study 3 examined how women responded to an ally’s help-seeking when the perpetrator was either present or absent.

Across all three studies, the researchers consistently found that when allies directly asked a marginalized person for help during a prejudice confrontation, marginalized group members reported more emotional burden than when no help was sought.

This heightened burden, in turn, partially reduced the ally’s standing in the eyes of marginalized group members, and made it less likely that they’d work or socialize with that ally in the future.

Osborne said that giving the marginalized person the option to engage, without directly calling them into the fray, might be preferable. 

“This was something that we didn’t explore in the paper,” he said, “but I think part of what’s evoking that feeling of emotional burden is feeling the mandate to speak out. Perhaps it’d be less burdensome if people felt like they were given the option to speak out and could either quietly decline or step into the space.”

Allyship is generally well-meaning, Osborne said, but can sometimes have unintended negative consequences. That doesn’t mean people should stop being allies, he said.

“We need to think of allyship in terms of how it’s helping the people who we’re being allies to,” he said, “and one of the ways that we have encouraged allyship in the past has been creating space for the marginalized person. But there are times when that might be not necessary.”