Motivated Categories: Social Structures Shape the Construction of Social Categories Through Attentional Mechanisms.

Social categories like race and gender often give rise to stereotypes and prejudice, and a great deal of research has focused on how motivations influence these biased beliefs. Here, we focus on potential biases in how these categories are even formed in the first place, suggesting that motivations can influence the very categories people use to group others. We propose that motivations to share schemas with other people and to gain resources shape people's attention to dimensions like race, gender, and age in different contexts.

Decoupling the Conflicting Evaluative Meanings in Automatically Activated Race-Based Associations.

Implicit measures of attitudes have classically focused on the association between a social group and generalized valence, but debate exists surrounding how these associations arise and what they can tell us about beliefs and attitudes. Here, we suggest that representations of oppression, which relate positively to implicitly measured prejudice but negatively to explicitly measured prejudice, can serve to decrease the predictive validity of implicit measures through statistical suppression. We had participants complete a Black-White implicit association test (IAT) and an IAT measuring representations of oppression, and find that oppression-related representations statistically suppress the relation between IAT scores and explicit attitudes, such that accounting for these representations increases the total amount of variance explained by implicit measures.

The labelled container: Conceptual development of social group representations.

Pietraszewski contends that group representations that rely on a "containment metaphor" fail to adequately capture phenomena of group dynamics such as shifts in allegiances. We argue, in contrast, that social categories allow for computationally efficient, richly structured, and flexible group representations that explain some of the most intriguing aspects of social group behaviour.

Avoidance begets avoidance: A computational account of negative stereotype persistence.

Research on stereotype formation has proposed a variety of reasons for how inaccurate stereotypes arise, focusing largely on accounts of motivation and cognitive efficiency. Here, we instead consider how stereotypes arise from basic processes of approach and avoidance in social learning. Across five studies, we show that initial negative interactions with some members of a group can cause subsequent avoidance of the entire group, and that this avoidance perpetuates stereotypes in two ways.

Considerations of Mutual Exchange in Prosocial Decision-Making.

Research using economic decision-making tasks has established that direct reciprocity plays a role in prosocial decision-making: people are more likely to help those who have helped them in the past. However, less is known about how considerations of mutual exchange influence decisions even when the other party's actions are unknown and direct reciprocity is therefore not possible. Using a two-party economic task in which the other's actions are unknown, Study 1 shows that prosociality critically depends on the potential for mutual exchange; when the other person has no opportunity to help the participant, prosocial behavior is drastically reduced.

Moral cues from ordinary behaviour.

People want to form impressions of others based on their moral behaviours, but the most diagnostic behaviours are rarely seen. Therefore, societies develop symbolic forms of moral behaviour such as conventional rituals and games, which are used to predict how others are likely to act in more serious moral situations. This framework helps explain why everyday behaviours are often moralized.