Hatfield v. McCoy
What's in a Name? Popular Names Are Less Common on Frontiers
Michael Varnum & Shinobu Kitayama
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Voluntary settlement on a frontier may promote values of independence. At present, however, researchers know little about the behavioral consequences of this process. In this study, we examined regional variations in baby naming. Because baby naming is an act of considerable personal and familial significance, it reflects prevalent cultural values. In support of the hypothesized link between frontier settlement and independence, we found that babies receive popular names less frequently in western regions of the United States than in its eastern regions (Study 1). The same pattern holds in Canada (Study 2), with popular names being less frequent in western provinces than in eastern provinces. Moreover, popular names are less frequently given to babies in world regions in which Europeans have settled (e.g., Australia, the United States) than in European countries (Study 3). These findings have implications for cross-generational transmission of cultural values.
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Constructing social identity: Silence and argument in an Arab-Jewish Israeli group encounter
Wendy Smith & Zvi Bekerman
Journal of Pragmatics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to uncover the subtle displays of identity which emerge when groups in macro-conflict interact in a structured setting. This study uses the tool of Conversational Analysis (CA) to examine a videotaped intergroup encounter session of Jews and Palestinians there to discuss "the conflict" in order to come to a mutual understanding. The central question we ask in this paper is how participants in a Jewish and Arab Israeli intergroup encounter collaborate to achieve their respective social identities. Adopting the tool of Conversational Analysis (CA), we examine the encounter's interactions in terms of its microfine conversational features, and show that non-normative gaps in talk (silence) seem to be strategically placed in terms of the unfolding of the discourse. In this paper, we explore silence, as used by members of both groups, to address and reconstruct the true power asymmetry. The microanalysis reveals that the development of the argument and the corresponding gaps in talk are intricately bound up with the construction of the social roles and the orientation of participants to each other. Ultimately we reveal how the two groups, in arguing their respective positions, work to redress existing power asymmetries.
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'The Sweet Taste of Sin' - A Muslim Drug Dealer in a Nordic Welfare State
Sveinung Sandberg
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, December 2010, Pages 103-118
Abstract:
Moa is a 22-year-old Muslim dealer selling drugs at a street drug market in Oslo. The main part of the paper consists of long interview extracts from three interviews with him. The aim is to capture some of the ambivalence and complexity that might otherwise be lost in traditional scholarly analysis. In short, Moa tells how he got into drug dealing in the first place, the help he received from a well-meaning welfare state apparatus, his feelings of remorse, guilt, and shame, and the attempts he made to break with the drug trade and its life-style. Moa's story highlights differences between street life in a benevolent welfare state with a penal system famous for its open-handedness, and street life under harder socio-economic and penal conditions. Even though Moa has more opportunities than offenders elsewhere, failing in a society where most others succeed is different from failing in a larger marginalized community. Moa's story also challenges the public view of Muslim offenders and questions established assumptions about the relationship between Islam and crime.
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Small Worlds and Cultural Polarization
Andreas Flache & Michael Macy
Journal of Mathematical Sociology, January 2011, Pages 146-176
Abstract:
Building on Granovetter's theory of the "strength of weak ties," research on "small-world" networks suggests that bridges between clusters in a social network (long-range ties) promote cultural diffusion, homogeneity, and integration. We show that this macro-level implication of network structure depends on hidden micro-level assumptions. Using a computational model similar to earlier studies, we find that ties between clusters facilitate cultural convergence under the micro-level assumptions of assimilation and attraction to similar others. However, these assumptions also have negative counterparts - differentiation and xenophobia. We found that when these negative possibilities are no longer assumed away, the effect of long-range ties reverses: Even very small amounts of contact between highly clustered communities sharply increased polarization at the population level.
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Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism
Carsten De Dreu et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 January 2011, Pages 1262-1266
Abstract:
Human ethnocentrism - the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups - creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members. In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group. Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate "love drug" or "cuddle chemical" and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.
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Jeff Stone, Jessica Whitehead, Toni Schmader & Elizabeth Focella
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two experiments tested the prediction that stigmatized individuals can avoid backlash when they confront others about bias if they first ask questions designed to activate self-affirmation processes. Experiment 1 showed that compared to a no-strategy control condition, highly prejudiced perceivers tended to express less desire to meet an Arab-American when he asked them to take his perspective on prejudice, but they expressed more desire to meet him when he asked self-affirming questions prior to making the perspective-taking request. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with a different affirmation and revealed that asking self-affirming questions reduced perceptions that the target was being confrontational when asking others to take his perspective. Together, these studies show that stigmatized targets can effectively challenge prejudiced individuals to reduce their biases if they first use a subtle strategy that reduces defensiveness.
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"In-group love" and "out-group hate" in repeated interaction between groups
Nir Halevy, Ori Weisel & Gary Bornstein
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Costly individual participation in intergroup conflict can be motivated by "in-group love"-a cooperative motivation to help the in-group, by "out-group hate"-an aggressive or competitive motivation to hurt the out-group, or both. This study employed a recently developed game paradigm (Halevy, Bornstein, & Sagiv, 2008) designed specifically to distinguish between these two motives. The game was played repeatedly between two groups with three players in each group. In addition, we manipulated the payoff structure of the interaction that preceded the game such that half of the groups experienced peaceful coexistence and the other half experienced heightened conflict prior to the game. Enabling group members to express in-group love independently of out-group hate significantly reduced intergroup conflict. Group members strongly preferred to cooperate within their group, rather than to compete against the out-group for relative standing, even in the condition in which the repeated game was preceded by conflict. Although both "in-group love" and "out-group hate" somewhat diminished as the game continued (as players became more selfish), choices indicative of the former motivation were significantly more frequent than choices indicative of the latter throughout the interaction. We discuss the implications of these findings for conflict resolution.
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Electromyographic Analyses of Responses to Intergroup Threat
Mark Davis & Walter Stephan
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, January 2011, Pages 196-218
Abstract:
Two studies tested predictions from intergroup threat theory concerning emotional responses to intergroup threat. Study 1 employed threatening video clips of the 9/11/01 World Trade Center attacks. Study 2 employed video clips of a threatening "opponent" in a competition. Facial electromyography (EMG) was employed to capture emotion-related muscle activity. As participants viewed videos in Study 1, they were instructed to consider Americans' reactions or their personal reactions. In Study 2, an "opponent" presented individually directed or group-directed stereotype threat. Both studies provide support for the theory: Participants experiencing individual threats displayed greater EMG activity in muscles corresponding to inwardly directed emotions (fear), while participants experiencing group threats displayed greater EMG activity in muscles corresponding to outwardly directed emotions (anger).
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Angela Leung & Dov Cohen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The CuPS (Culture × Person × Situation) approach attempts to jointly consider culture and individual differences, without treating either as noise and without reducing one to the other. Culture is important because it helps define psychological situations and create meaningful clusters of behavior according to particular logics. Individual differences are important because individuals vary in the extent to which they endorse or reject a culture's ideals. Further, because different cultures are organized by different logics, individual differences mean something different in each. Central to these studies are concepts of honor-related violence and individual worth as being inalienable versus socially conferred. We illustrate our argument with 2 experiments involving participants from honor, face, and dignity cultures. The studies showed that the same "type" of person who was most helpful, honest, and likely to behave with integrity in one culture was the "type" of person least likely to do so in another culture. We discuss how CuPS can provide a rudimentary but integrated approach to understanding both within- and between-culture variation.
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Yarrow Dunham
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
When are intergroup biases learned responses to specific social groups, and when are they the result of more general cognitive tendencies? This study investigates this question in the context of the tendency for White Americans to be influenced by angry facial affect when making racial categorizations (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2004), asking whether this same tendency occurs when the groups in question are not racial groups but rather arbitrarily assigned minimal social groups. Results show that while participants are more likely to categorize angry faces as belonging to a racial outgroup, they are equally likely to categorize angry faces as belonging to a minimal outgroup. Thus, the link between anger and group membership cannot be characterized as a learned link between race and affect, but rather must be attributed to more general intergroup processes. By contrast, implicit attitudes are considerably stronger for racial than minimal outgroups, suggesting a more central role for social learning in their emergence.
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Us Versus Them: Social Identity Shapes Neural Responses to Intergroup Competition and Harm
Mina Cikara, Matthew Botvinick & Susan Fiske
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intergroup competition makes social identity salient, which in turn affects how people respond to competitors' hardships. The failures of an in-group member are painful, whereas those of a rival out-group member may give pleasure-a feeling that may motivate harming rivals. The present study examined whether valuation-related neural responses to rival groups' failures correlate with likelihood of harming individuals associated with those rivals. Avid fans of the Red Sox and Yankees teams viewed baseball plays while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjectively negative outcomes (failure of the favored team or success of the rival team) activated anterior cingulate cortex and insula, whereas positive outcomes (success of the favored team or failure of the rival team, even against a third team) activated ventral striatum. The ventral striatum effect, associated with subjective pleasure, also correlated with self-reported likelihood of aggressing against a fan of the rival team (controlling for general aggression). Outcomes of social group competition can directly affect primary reward-processing neural systems, which has implications for intergroup harm.
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James Laurence
European Sociological Review, February 2011, Pages 70-89
Abstract:
A number of studies have found a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social capital and assumed from this a harmful effect of diversity on social cohesion. This article suggests that social cohesion must be treated as a multifaceted concept and any analysis into the relationship between diversity and social capital needs to be complemented by an analysis of diversity's effect on ‘relations between ethnic groups'. Our results show that while increasing diversity does have a negative impact on social capital, it simultaneously improves perceptions of, and relations between, ethnic groups. Furthermore, we find that forming ‘bridging' ties in diverse environments plays a significant role in the positive relationship between diversity and tolerance, and that the presence of ‘bridging' ties can also reduce the negative impact of diversity on social capital. However, while our results show that diversity has both positive and negative effects on social cohesion, we find that it is disadvantage which has the most detrimental impact, undermining both social capital and interethnic relations. We also find evidence that using a more sensitive measure of diversity (creating an area typology based on the proportional size, number, and type of ethnic groups in an area) reveals that living in different structures of diversity may lead to different social cohesion outcomes.
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Islamophobia in Austria: The Recent Emergence of Anti-Muslim Sentiments in the Country
Klaus Hodl
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, December 2010, Pages 443-456
Abstract:
This paper examines the characteristics of Islamophobia in contemporary Austria. The country represents a particularly interesting case study of the dissemination of anti-Muslim sentiments as it has had a strong tradition of populist, right-wing politics, which was closely associated with the name of Jrg Haider until his death in 2008. However, publicly voiced prejudices against Muslims have remained comparatively rare. For some time, Austria's policy towards its Muslim population was even regarded as a model to be adopted by other countries. Even though this situation has started to change in the last three or four years, Islamophobia in Austria still seems to be more modest than, for example, in The Netherlands, where populist politics and anti-Muslim diatribes are closely connected. A further thesis to be confirmed in this research links anti-Muslim rhetoric in Austria with entrenched Judeophobic prejudices in the society at large. In this sense, some kinds of Islamophobia may serve as a cover for anti-Semitism. This view is very much in accordance with Austria's collective memory, which for a long time has demonstrated an amiable attitude towards Muslims, whereas Jews have always been seen as the utmost enemy. At a time when anti-Semitism has become socially disrespected, Islamophobia, a widely held attitude throughout Europe, is being used to appeal to Judeophobic sentiments.
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Usual suspects? Public views about immigrants' impact on crime in European countries
Alin Ceobanu
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, February 2011, Pages 114-131
Abstract:
Using data from the 2002/3 module of the European Social Survey project, this study examines the relationship between public views about immigrants' impact on crime and measures of criminal behavior in 21 countries of Europe. The results from hierarchical regression models show that perceptions about immigrants' impact are unaffected by personal experience with crime and by contextual measures such as the homicide rate, prison population rate, and ratio of foreign inmate to non-European foreign population. The analysis further reveals that perceived immigrants' impact on crime is sensitive to having friends among immigrants, residing in an ethnic neighborhood, having affinity with right-wing ideologies, as well as several socio-demographic characteristics. At the country level, perceptions that immigrants worsen crime problems are more evident in societies harboring larger stocks of non-European immigrants, but such views are not affected by economic circumstances. These findings imply that Europeans' expressions of concern regarding immigrants' impact on crime may be a guised form of prejudice against foreigners, as they seem to be nurtured less by fear of crime and more by fear of immigrants. The reported results are discussed with respect to the restrictiveness of immigration regimes and the practice of criminalizing foreigners.
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Ethnic Diversity and Employment Growth in English Cities
Neil Lee
Urban Studies, February 2011, Pages 407-425
Abstract:
There are many reasons why cities with diverse populations may grow faster. Ethnic diversity might attract human capital, tourists or firms, increase productivity through diverse approaches to problem-solving or ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Yet there are also reasons to believe that diversity could be harmful, by leading to sub-optimal provision of public goods or reducing trust or social capital. Or it may be irrelevant, being merely a proxy for class. A number of studies have shown both positive and negative relationships between diversity and growth, using a range of different measures for ‘diversity'. This paper asks two questions: have more diverse English cities grown faster? And does measurement matter: is it important to have a multinational population or an ethnically diverse one? To answer these questions, in this paper a range of models are estimated for employment growth for 53 English cities between 1981 and 2001. The evidence suggests that cities with a high proportion of their populations born abroad in 1981 grew faster in the subsequent 10 years. Neither diversity by country of birth nor ethnic diversity is significant in the period 1991-2001. However, when variables accounting for both are included together, it appears that cities with a large number of migrants saw higher employment growth in the 1990s, but that ethnically diverse cities were less successful. The results presented here suggest that considerable attention needs to be paid to the variable used to indicate ‘diversity' in these studies and that the impact of diversity varies according to nature of the groups any indicator for ‘diversity' is representing.
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Role of Age, Sex, and Race on Cardiac and Total Mortality Associated With Super Bowl Wins and Losses
Robert Kloner et al.
Clinical Cardiology, forthcoming
Background: Total and cardiac mortality rates in Los Angeles County, Califorina, increased after the 1980 Super Bowl loss (SBL), but there was an overall reduction in total mortality after the 1984 Super Bowl win (SBW).
Hypothesis: We hypothesized that age, sex, and race may have played a role in the Super Bowl related differences in death rates.
Methods: We compared mortality rates for SB-related days with non-SB control days assessing differences in demographics. We ran regression models predicting daily death rates per 100,000 including SB variable versus non-SB control days for age, sex, race, and interactions for these covariates.
Results: After the SBL, daily death rates increased for both males and females. People aged ≥65 years had a larger absolute increase in all cause mortality during the SBL days compared with those aged <65 years, with significant interaction between age and SBL-variable for all-cause and cardiac-related mortality. Whites and Hispanics had increased death rates on SBL days. There were trends suggesting less death in older patients and females associated with the SBW.
Conclusion: A SBL triggered increased deaths in both men and women and especially in older patients, whereas a SBW reduced death more in those aged ≥65 years and in women.