J Exp Psychol Gen
November 2024
Traditional explanations for stereotypes assume that they result from deficits in humans (ingroup-favoring motives, cognitive biases) or their environments (majority advantages, real group differences). An alternative explanation recently proposed that stereotypes can emerge when exploration is costly. Even optimal decision makers in an ideal environment can inadvertently form incorrect impressions from arbitrary encounters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFive studies (N = 7972) validated a brief measure and model of four facets of social evaluation (friendliness and morality as horizontal facets; ability and assertiveness as vertical facets). Perceivers expressed their personal impressions or estimated society's impression of different types of targets (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccording to ambivalent sexism theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996), the coexistence of gendered power differences and mutual interdependence creates two apparently opposing but complementary sexist ideologies: hostile sexism (HS; viewing women as manipulative competitors who seek to gain power over men) coincides with benevolent sexism (BS; a chivalrous view of women as pure and moral, yet weak and passive, deserving men's protection and admiration, as long as they conform). The research on these ideologies employs the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, used extensively in psychology and allied disciplines, often to understand the roles sexist attitudes play in reinforcing gender inequality. Following contemporary guidelines, this systematic review utilizes a principled approach to synthesize the multidisciplinary empirical literature on ambivalent sexism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial intelligence (A.I.) increasingly suffuses everyday life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal government policymaking. Government policy has tended to rely on tools with more predictable responses-incentives, transfers, and prohibitions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Gen
September 2023
People belong to multiple social groups simultaneously. However, much remains to be learned about the rich semantic perceptions of multiply-categorized targets. Two pretests and three main studies ( = 1,116) compare perceptions of single social categories to perceptions of two intersecting social categories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pers Soc Psychol
December 2022
The spontaneous stereotype content model (SSCM) describes a comprehensive taxonomy, with associated properties and predictive value, of social-group beliefs that perceivers report in open-ended responses. Four studies ( = 1,470) show the utility of spontaneous stereotypes, compared to traditional, prompted, scale-based stereotypes. Using natural language processing text analyses, Study 1 shows the most common spontaneous stereotype dimensions for salient social groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInaccurate stereotypes-perceived differences among groups that do not actually differ-are prevalent and consequential. Past research explains stereotypes as emerging from a range of factors, including motivational biases, cognitive limitations, and information deficits. Considering the minimal forces required to produce inaccurate assumptions about group differences, we found that locally adaptive exploration is sufficient: An initial arbitrary interaction, if rewarding enough, may discourage people from investigating alternatives that would be equal or better.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Res Princ Implic
December 2021
Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2021
Global cooperation rests on popular endorsement of cosmopolitan values-putting all humanity equal to or ahead of conationals. Despite being comparative judgments that may trade off, even sacrifice, the in-group's interests for the rest of the world, moral cosmopolitanism finds support in large, nationally representative surveys from Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Japan, the United States, Colombia, and Guatemala. A series of studies probe this trading off of the in-group's interests against the world's interests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities depend on functions, having relational goals (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial evaluation occurs at personal, interpersonal, group, and intergroup levels, with competing theories and evidence. Five models engage in adversarial collaboration, to identify common conceptual ground, ongoing controversies, and continuing agendas: Dual Perspective Model (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007); Behavioral Regulation Model (Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007); Dimensional Compensation Model (Yzerbyt et al., 2005); Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002); and Agency-Beliefs-Communion Model (Koch, Imhoff, Dotsch, Unkelbach, & Alves, 2016).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRace is fraught with meaning, but unequal status is central. Race-status associations (RSAs) link White Americans with high status and Black Americans with low status. RSAs could occur via observation of racially distributed jobs, perceived status-related stereotypic attributes, or simple ranking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen we first wrote Social Cognition (1984), social psychology's crisis critiqued methods, replicability, theory, and relevance. Social cognition research illustrates four phases of response to these challenges. First, the Cognitive Miser approach introduced methods less prone to experimenter or participant interference: looking time as attention, categorical memory for who said what.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) that has caused the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic represents the greatest international biopsychosocial emergency the world has faced for a century, and psychological science has an integral role to offer in helping societies recover. The aim of this paper is to set out the shorter- and longer-term priorities for research in psychological science that will (a) frame the breadth and scope of potential contributions from across the discipline; (b) enable researchers to focus their resources on gaps in knowledge; and (c) help funders and policymakers make informed decisions about future research priorities in order to best meet the needs of societies as they emerge from the acute phase of the pandemic. The research priorities were informed by an expert panel convened by the British Psychological Society that reflects the breadth of the discipline; a wider advisory panel with international input; and a survey of 539 psychological scientists conducted early in May 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
June 2020
With globalization and immigration, societal contexts differ in sheer variety of resident social groups. Social diversity challenges individuals to think in new ways about new kinds of people and where their groups all stand, relative to each other. However, psychological science does not yet specify how human minds represent social diversity, in homogeneous or heterogenous contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCrises in science concern not only methods, statistics, and results but also, theory development. Beyond the indispensable refinement of tools and procedures, resolving crises would also benefit from a deeper understanding of the concepts and processes guiding research. Usually, theories compete, and some lose, incentivizing destruction of seemingly opposing views.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStatus (respect, prestige) and power (resource control) arguably form two kinds of inequality. Status differences appear culturally reasonable as vertical inequality-with a common rationale: meritocracy (deservingness). High-status individuals and groups are accorded competence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism's rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF