Group dynamics
Higher Moral Obligations of Tolerance Toward Other Minorities: An Extra Burden on Stigmatized Groups
Saulo Fernández et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
In four experiments, we tested whether members of stigmatized groups are expected to be more tolerant toward other minorities than members of non-stigmatized groups and assessed the consequences of disconfirming those expectancies. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that majority group members expected members of a stigmatized group to be more tolerant toward immigrants, particularly when the stigmatized minority was perceived as having overcome the negative consequences of its victimization. When this tolerance expectation was disconfirmed, stigmatized group members were judged more immoral than members of a non-stigmatized group that held the same intolerant attitudes. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that these effects were driven by the belief that stigmatized groups should derive benefits from their suffering. These findings suggest that stigmatized groups are judged according to stricter moral standards than non-stigmatized groups because majority group members need to make meaning of the undeserved suffering experienced by victims of social stigma.
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Social exclusion and xenophobia: Intolerant attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities
Nilüfer Aydin et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research investigates the effects of social exclusion on attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities. Native-born German participants who were socially excluded rather than included reported greater approval for stricter legislation regarding the naturalization of immigrants (Study 1), reported greater prejudice against openly observant Muslims (Studies 2 and 3), and stronger agreement with the view that immigrants are financial burdens to the state (Study 4). Social exclusion threatens the sense of personal control, which in turn leads to stronger rejection of stigmatized outgroups (Study 3). When perceived control was experimentally enhanced, the social exclusion effect disappeared (Study 4). The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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Anna-Kaisa Newheiser & Manuela Barreto
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2014, Pages 58–70
Abstract:
People who possess a concealable stigmatized identity (e.g., minority sexual orientation; history of mental illness) often hide this identity from others in order to avoid bias. Despite the possible benefits of this identity management strategy, we propose that instead of increasing acceptance, hiding a stigmatized identity can result in a lowered sense of belonging and even actual social rejection. Across four studies, we show that although individuals living with concealable stigmatized identities report a preference for hiding (vs. revealing) the identity during social interactions, hiding in fact reduces feelings of belonging — an effect that is mediated by felt inauthenticity and reduced general self-disclosure (i.e., disclosure of self-relevant information not limited to the stigmatized identity). Furthermore, the detrimental interpersonal effects of hiding (vs. revealing) a stigmatized identity are detected by external observers and non-stigmatized interaction partners. Implications for understanding the predicament of people living with stigmatized social identities are discussed.
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Racial Progress as Threat to the Status Hierarchy: Implications for Perceptions of Anti-White Bias
Clara Wilkins & Cheryl Kaiser
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In three studies, we examined how racial progress affects Whites’ perceptions of anti-White bias. When racial progress was chronically (Study 1) and experimentally (Study 2) salient, Whites who believed the current U.S. status hierarchy was legitimate were more likely to report that Whites were victims of racial discrimination. In contrast, Whites who perceived the current status system as illegitimate were unaffected by the salience of racial progress. The results of Study 3 point to the role of threat in explaining these divergent reactions to racial progress. When self-affirmed, Whites who perceived the status hierarchy as legitimate no longer showed increased perceptions of anti-White bias when confronted with evidence of racial progress. Implications for policies designed to remedy social inequality are discussed.
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When an “Educated” Black Man Becomes Lighter in the Mind’s Eye
Avi Ben-Zeev et al.
SAGE Open, January 2014
Abstract:
We offer novel evidence that a Black man appears lighter in the mind’s eye following a counter-stereotypic prime, a phenomenon we refer to as skin tone memory bias. In Experiment 1, participants were primed subliminally with the counter-stereotypic word educated or with the stereotypic word ignorant, followed by the target stimulus of a Black man’s face. A recognition memory task for the target’s face and six lures (skin tone variations of ±25%, ±37%, and ±50%) revealed that participants primed with “educated” exhibited more memory errors with respect to lighter lures — misidentifying even the lightest lure as the target more often than counterparts primed with “ignorant.” This skin tone memory bias was replicated in Experiment 2. We situate these findings in theorizing on the mind’s striving for cognitive consistency. Black individuals who defy social stereotypes might not challenge social norms sufficiently but rather may be remembered as lighter, perpetuating status quo beliefs.
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The Impact of Hispanic and White Group Cues on Attitudes Towards the Violation of Generic Norms
Mirjam Cranmer & Skyler Cranmer
PLoS ONE, December 2013
Abstract:
While much work in political science has examined the impact of racial cues on individual perceptions, we know little about how individuals evaluate members of minority outgroups on issues that are not linked to stereotypes. We measure the impacts of Hispanic and White cues on individual assessments related to a stereotype-independent norm violation: alcoholism. We test three competing theories – cognition, intergroup emotions, and social identity – using a population-based vignette experiment included in the General Social Survey. Our results contradict much of the literature, but keep with social identity theory's predictions. Hispanic alcoholics, when Hispanics constitute the outgroup, are assessed less negatively than White alcoholics in the ingroup, the latter experiencing what is called the black sheep effect. The black sheep effect occurs when ingroup members are more punitive towards members of the ingroup than the outgroup. However, the black sheep effect does not extend to measures that are more consistent with outgroup stereotypes, such as violence or money mismanagement; Hispanic alcoholics are evaluated more negatively than Whites on these measures. The implication is that the effect of racial cues depends strongly on issue linkages to group stereotypes.
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Leor Hackel, Christine Looser & Jay Van Bavel
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2014, Pages 15–23
Abstract:
Human faces are used as cues to the presence of social agents, and the ability to detect minds and mental states in others occupies a central role in social interaction. In the current research, we present evidence that the human propensity for mind perception is bound by social group membership. Specifically, we show how identification with different social groups influences the threshold for mind perception. In three experiments, participants assessed a continuum of face morphs that ranged from human to doll faces. These faces were described as in-group or out-group members. Participants had higher (i.e., more stringent) thresholds for perceiving minds behind out-group faces, both in minimal (Experiment 1) and real-world groups (Experiment 2). In other words, out-group members required more humanness than in-group members to be perceived as having minds. This intergroup bias in mind perception was moderated by collective identification, such that highly identified group members had the highest threshold for perceiving minds behind out-group relative to in-group faces. In contrast, Democrats and Republicans who perceived the other party as threatening had lower thresholds for perceiving minds behind out-group faces (Experiment 3). These experiments suggest that mind perception is a dynamic process in which relevant contextual information such as social identity and out-group threat change the interpretation of physical features that signal the presence of another mind. Implications for mind perception, dehumanization, and intergroup relations are discussed.
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David Butz, Kathleen Klik & Ashby Plant
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although accumulating research indicates that negative expectations about interracial interactions undermine the quality of such interactions, little research has examined the factors that moderate the influence of negative expectations on responses to interracial interactions. We propose that individuals who endorse work-related ideologies such as the Protestant work ethic (PWE) expect that outcomes in interracial interactions should be contingent upon individual effort. As a result, such individuals are hypothesized to respond in a negative manner when they believe that regardless of their effort in an interracial interaction, interaction partners will respond negatively to them (termed negative response expectancies). Consistent with this hypothesis, negative response expectancies led to an increased desire to avoid interracial interactions (Studies 1a and 1b) and more antisocial behavior directed at an interracial interaction partner among individuals who strongly endorsed the PWE (Study 2). Across the studies, effects of negative response expectancies were relatively weaker or non-significant among individuals lower in the PWE. The implications of these findings for understanding the interplay between the PWE and expectancies in interracial interactions are discussed.
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Brian Donovan
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, forthcoming
Abstract:
Race has been a longstanding topic in the biology textbook curriculum. Yet, there appears to be no research investigating whether the treatment of race in modern biology textbooks impacts how students conceptualize race. In the present study, a double-blind field experiment employing mixed-methods is used to investigate the impact of textbook-based genetics learning on essentialist conceptions of race amongst adolescents. The study was carried out in an eighth grade classroom in a California Bay Area School. Students recruited for the study (N = 43) read either a racialized or a non-racialized textbook passage on human genetic diseases and completed a reading comprehension assessment. After a short distracting task they responded to items in two different race conception instruments. Controlling for race, gender, age, prior race-conceptions, and reading comprehension, statistically significant effects were observed on both race conception instruments by treatment. Students in the racialized condition exhibited stronger essentialist conceptions of race than students in the non-racialized condition. Additionally, an exploratory analysis indicated that an understanding of Mendelian heredity moderated the observed treatment effects. The findings of the present study tentatively suggest that textbook-based instruction in school biology can inadvertently reinforce essentialist conceptions of race that underlie racial bias. Implications for teaching and research are discussed.
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Permission to be prejudiced: Legitimacy credits in the evaluation of advertisements
Beomjoon Choi, Chris Crandall & Suna La
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated discrimination in the context of evaluating advertisements, based on the suppression model (justification-suppression model [JSM]) of prejudice expression. Previous research has demonstrated that when people are given an opportunity to give a high rating to an ad featuring a Black model, a sense of nonprejudice is created, which, in turn, provides an opportunity to discriminate subsequently without feeling prejudiced. We extended the JSM by investigating whether the acquisition of legitimacy credits (a moral authority earned by demonstrating nonprejudice) is a sufficient condition to release the expression of prejudice. We found that subjects who first evaluated a high-quality ad featuring a Black model felt eligible to use legitimacy credits in subsequent evaluations. But in a subsequent study, participants who acquired these credits evaluated Black model ads more negatively than White model ads only when these ads were of low quality. The implications for evaluating the subtle way that prejudice affects rating of models of color in advertisements are discussed.
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Racial Bias in Neural Empathic Responses to Pain
Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2013
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that perceiving the pain of others activates brain regions in the observer associated with both somatosensory and affective-motivational aspects of pain, principally involving regions of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula cortex. The degree of these empathic neural responses is modulated by racial bias, such that stronger neural activation is elicited by observing pain in people of the same racial group compared with people of another racial group. The aim of the present study was to examine whether a more general social group category, other than race, could similarly modulate neural empathic responses and perhaps account for the apparent racial bias reported in previous studies. Using a minimal group paradigm, we assigned participants to one of two mixed-race teams. We use the term race to refer to the Chinese or Caucasian appearance of faces and whether the ethnic group represented was the same or different from the appearance of the participant' own face. Using fMRI, we measured neural empathic responses as participants observed members of their own group or other group, and members of their own race or other race, receiving either painful or non-painful touch. Participants showed clear group biases, with no significant effect of race, on behavioral measures of implicit (affective priming) and explicit group identification. Neural responses to observed pain in the anterior cingulate cortex, insula cortex, and somatosensory areas showed significantly greater activation when observing pain in own-race compared with other-race individuals, with no significant effect of minimal groups. These results suggest that racial bias in neural empathic responses is not influenced by minimal forms of group categorization, despite the clear association participants showed with in-group more than out-group members. We suggest that race may be an automatic and unconscious mechanism that drives the initial neural responses to observed pain in others.
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Vani Mathur et al.
Journal of Pain, forthcoming
Abstract:
Racial disparities in pain treatment pose a significant public health and scientific problem. Prior studies demonstrate clinicians and non-clinicians are less perceptive, and suggest less treatment for, the pain of African Americans, relative to European Americans. Here we investigate the effects of explicit/implicit patient race presentation, patient race, and perceiver race on pain perception and response. African American and European American participants rated pain perception, empathy, helping motivation, and treatment suggestion in response to vignettes about patients’ pain. Vignettes were accompanied by a rapid (implicit), or static (explicit) presentation of an African or European American patient’s face. Participants perceived and responded more to European American patients in the implicit prime condition, when the effect of patient race was below the level of conscious regulation. This effect was reversed when patient race was presented explicitly. Additionally, female participants perceived and responded more to the pain of all patients, relative to male participants, and in the implicit prime condition, African American participants were more perceptive and responsive than European Americans to the pain of all patients. Taken together, these results suggest that known disparities in pain treatment may be largely due to automatic (below the level of conscious regulation), rather than deliberate (subject to conscious regulation) biases. These biases were not associated with traditional implicit measures of racial attitudes, suggesting that biases in pain perception and response may be independent of general prejudice.
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More than music! A longitudinal test of German–Polish music encounters
Dieta Kuchenbrandt et al.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines music encounters as a hitherto unexplored type of intergroup contact intervention. We tested the short- and mid-term effects of German–Polish music encounters that either took place in Germany or in Poland, respectively, on German's attitudes toward Poles. Ninety-nine German participants completed a questionnaire one week before the encounter (t0), directly thereafter (t1), and four weeks later (t2). The control group (N = 67) did not take part in any music encounter and completed the measures twice (t0 and t2). Results revealed that attitudes toward the Polish out-group improved sustainably, but only when the encounter took place in Poland. In contrast, for encounters realized in Germany, no attitude change occurred. Implications of these findings are discussed.
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Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity and Trust: The Role of Intergroup Contact and Perceived Threat
Katharina Schmid, Ananthi Al Ramiah & Miles Hewstone
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research reported here speaks to a contentious debate concerning the potential negative consequences of diversity for trust. We tested the relationship between neighborhood diversity and out-group, in-group, and neighborhood trust, taking into consideration previously untested indirect effects via intergroup contact and perceived intergroup threat. A large-scale national survey in England sampled White British majority (N = 868) and ethnic minority (N = 798) respondents from neighborhoods of varying degrees of diversity. Multilevel path analyses showed some negative direct effects of diversity for the majority group but also confirmed predictions that diversity was associated indirectly with increased trust via positive contact and lower threat. These indirect effects had positive implications for total effects of diversity, cancelling out most negative direct effects. Our findings have relevance for a growing body of research seeking to disentangle effects of diversity on trust that has so far largely ignored the key role of intergroup contact.
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The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community
Zachary Neal & Jennifer Watling Neal
American Journal of Community Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community. Using agent-based modeling to simulate neighborhoods and neighborhood social network formation, we explore whether the community-diversity dialectic emerges from two principles of relationship formation: homophily and proximity. The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community. Based on these results, we conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to create neighborhoods that simultaneously foster respect for diversity and sense of community.
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Changing prejudiced attitudes by thinking about persuasive messages: Implications for resistance
Miguel Cárdaba et al.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research showed that changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups can result from both the simple processes that require little thinking and the traditional elaborative forms of persuasion that require high thinking processes. Importantly, even when the obtained attitude change was equivalent for situations in which there was high and low message elaboration, the changes produced in high thinking conditions were found to be more resistant to further attacks than equivalent changes produced by less thoughtful mechanisms. Not only were those attitudes more resistant as measured objectively (Study 1) but participants also perceived their attitudes to be subjectively more resistant (Study 2). These studies suggest that examining the processes by which prejudice is changed can be important for understanding the consequences and long-term implications of treatments and campaigns oriented to changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups.
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Didier Caluwaerts & Min Reuchamps
Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Deliberative democrats assume that political deliberation is capable of transforming citizens’ opinions and attitudes. This article takes this assumption as a starting point and tries to test it empirically by determining whether deliberation in an inter-group setting induces more positive out-group attitudes. Based on data from two deliberative experiments in Belgium, we argue that the overall effect of deliberative quality on attitude change is limited. The most important determinant of changes in out-group attitudes is the group composition. Citizens who are confronted with the out-group are more likely to hold more positive out-group attitudes afterwards.
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Perspective-Taking Increases Willingness to Engage in Intergroup Contact
Cynthia Wang et al.
PLoS ONE, January 2014
Abstract:
The current research explored whether perspective-taking increases willingness to engage in contact with stereotyped outgroup members. Across three studies, we find that perspective-taking increases willingness to engage in contact with negatively-stereotyped targets. In Study 1, perspective-takers sat closer to, whereas stereotype suppressors sat further from, a hooligan compared to control participants. In Study 2, individual differences in perspective-taking tendencies predicted individuals' willingness to engage in contact with a hooligan, having effects above and beyond those of empathic concern. Finally, Study 3 demonstrated that perspective-taking's effects on intergroup contact extend to the target's group (i.e., another homeless man), but not to other outgroups (i.e., a man of African descent). Consistent with other perspective-taking research, our findings show that perspective-taking facilitates the creation of social bonds by increasing contact with stereotyped outgroup members.
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Good education for all? Student race and identity development in the multicultural classroom
Daniela Martin
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the role of ethnic identity in students’ responses to a multicultural curriculum. Specifically, it tested group differences in the key premise of multicultural education, which is that learning about other groups affects students’ identity formation and that this learning translates into skills critical to academic success, intergroup harmony, and promotion of democratic values. The results provided partial support of the hypothesis. Participating in a curriculum focusing on race and ethnicity yielded more benefits to White than non-White students, suggesting that Whites may be uniquely positioned to benefit from multiculturalism. Possible mechanisms underlying the different outcomes of multicultural education for various groups of students are discussed.
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Face Recognition and Own-Ethnicity Bias in Black, East/Southeast Asian, Hispanic, and White Children
Thomas Gross
Asian American Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals tend to recognize persons of their own ethnicity better than those of another, a phenomenon known as own-ethnicity bias. One explanation of this bias is the contact hypothesis, that is, face recognition is better for ethnic faces that are seen more often. Own ethnicity bias in children, specifically Hispanic children, has received little attention and this study examined own-ethnicity bias in Black (n = 53), East/Southeast Asian (n = 54), Hispanic (n = 96), and White (n = 247) children 5–7, 9–11, 13–16 years of age from southern California. With the majority of individuals in southern California being Hispanic or White, the contact hypothesis predicts that children should recognize own-ethnicity faces better than other-ethnicity faces and other-ethnicity Hispanic and White faces better than Asian or Black faces. Children were shown 32 adult and child, men and women Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White faces. They were then asked to recognize previously seen faces from a set of old and new faces. Own-ethnicity bias was found for Hispanic and White participants. Some support was found for the contact hypothesis, that is, Hispanic and White children recognized Hispanic and White faces better than Black faces, and for White children, better than Asian faces. Contrary to expectations, Hispanic children recognized Asian faces better than Black faces; and, Asian and Black children exhibited no significant bias. An alternative explanation of face recognition biases focused on children’s attitudes toward ethnic groups.