What you are
Colin Holbrook et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political conservatives have been widely documented to regard out-group members as hostile, perceive individuals of ambiguous intent as malevolent, and favor aggressive solutions to intergroup conflict. A growing literature indicates that potential violent adversaries are represented using the dimensions of envisioned physical size/strength to summarize opponents' fighting capacities relative to the self or in-group. Integrating these programs, we hypothesized that, compared to liberals, conservatives would envision an ambiguous out-group target as more likely to pose a threat, yet as vanquishable through force, and thus as less formidable. Participants from the United States (Study 1) and Spain (Study 2) assessed Syrian refugees, a group that the public widely suspects includes terrorists. As predicted, in both societies, conservatives envisioned refugees as more likely to be terrorists and as less physically formidable. As hypothesized, this "Gulliver effect" was mediated by confidence in each society's capacity to thwart terrorism via aggressive military or police measures.
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The "Bad Is Black" Effect: Why People Believe Evildoers Have Darker Skin Than Do-Gooders
Adam Alter et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, December 2016, Pages 1653-1665
Abstract:
Across six studies, people used a "bad is black" heuristic in social judgment and assumed that immoral acts were committed by people with darker skin tones, regardless of the racial background of those immoral actors. In archival studies of news articles written about Black and White celebrities in popular culture magazines (Study 1a) and American politicians (Study 1b), the more critical rather than complimentary the stories, the darker the skin tone of the photographs printed with the article. In the remaining four studies, participants associated immoral acts with darker skinned people when examining surveillance footage (Studies 2 and 4), and when matching headshots to good and bad actions (Studies 3 and 5). We additionally found that both race-based (Studies 2, 3, and 5) and shade-based (Studies 4 and 5) associations between badness and darkness determine whether people demonstrate the "bad is black" effect. We discuss implications for social perception and eyewitness identification.
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Pedro Bordalo et al.
NBER Working Paper, December 2016
Abstract:
We conduct a laboratory experiment on the determinants of beliefs about own and others' ability across different domains. A preliminary look at the data points to two distinct forces: miscalibration in estimating performance depending on the difficulty of tasks and gender stereotypes. We develop a theoretical model that separates these forces and apply it to analyze a large laboratory dataset in which participants estimate their own and a partner's performance on questions across six subjects: arts and literature, emotion recognition, business, verbal reasoning, mathematics, and sports. We find that participants greatly overestimate not only their own ability but also that of others, suggesting that miscalibration is a substantial, first order factor in stated beliefs. Women are better calibrated than men, providing more accurate estimates of ability both for themselves and for others. Gender stereotypes also have strong predictive power for beliefs, particularly for men's beliefs about themselves and others' beliefs about the ability of men. Our findings help interpret evidence on gender gaps in self-confidence.
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A Content Analytic Study of Appearance Standards for Women of Color in Magazines
Leah Boepple & Kevin Thompson
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, forthcoming
Abstract:
Media portrayals of Caucasian women have received a great deal of research attention. However, substantially less research exists examining media portrayals of women of color. This content analytic study examined appearance messages and standards for women of color present in popular magazines. The 17 magazines (aimed for female audiences) with the highest circulation ratings were rated. All images and text of the magazines were coded. Cohen's Kappa for all variables was .86. Ninety-six percent of Black women, 91.67% of Asian women, and 96.61% of Latina women had either light- or medium-toned skin. Sixty-three percent of Black women, 100% of Asian women, and 98.59% of Latina women had long, straight hair. Forty-two percent of Black women, 100% of Asian women, and 54% of Latina women had smaller facial features consistent with Caucasian norms. The current study is the first of its kind to examine media-based appearance standards for Asian and Latina women in magazines.
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Aharon Levy et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on dual identity focuses mainly on how dual identifiers feel and behave, and on the reactions they elicit from others. In this article we test an unexplored aspect of dual identity: the dual identity group's potential to act as a possible gateway between the groups that represent the respective sources of the dual identity (e.g., Israeli Arabs as a gateway between Israelis and Palestinians). We predicted that to the extent that a group is perceived to have a dual identity, intergroup attitudes and behavior of the groups comprising that dual identity will be improved. This idea was tested across four studies. Study 1a and b were real-world correlational studies which revealed positive correlations between the perception of a dual identity and attitudes towards the outgroup. In Studies 2 and 3 we demonstrated experimentally that the mere presence of a group with a dual identity leads to improved outgroup orientations. In Study 4 we demonstrated how the manipulation of perceived dual identity can help improve attitudes towards the outgroup, and also provided initial indications regarding the mechanisms underlying the process at hand. We discuss the implications of the findings for the improvement of intergroup relations, and offer an outline for future research.
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Allison Skinner, Andrew Meltzoff & Kristina Olson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Identifying the origins of social bias is critical to devising strategies to overcome prejudice. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that young children can catch novel social biases from brief exposure to biased nonverbal signals demonstrated by adults. Our results are consistent with this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we found that children who were exposed to a brief video depicting nonverbal bias in favor of one individual over another subsequently explicitly preferred, and were more prone to behave prosocially toward, the target of positive nonverbal signals. Moreover, in Experiment 2, preschoolers generalized such bias to other individuals. The spread of bias observed in these experiments lays a critical foundation for understanding the way that social biases may develop and spread early in childhood.
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Social projection to liked and disliked targets: The role of perceived similarity
Mark Davis
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some accounts of social projection view it as an essentially cognitive phenomenon, prompted by the need for a relatively low-effort way to arrive at inferences about others. Other accounts argue that projection is motivated by self-enhancement and self-protection concerns. This investigation evaluates these accounts by having participants make inferences about liked and disliked real-world targets. In Studies 1 and 2, participants projected more to liked than disliked targets, supporting a motivational account; however, when perceived similarity was accounted for, this difference disappeared, supporting the cognitive account. In Study 3 participants made inferences about targets who varied along both the valence and similarity dimensions; there was greater projection to all similar targets, but target valence only influenced projection if the targets were also seen as similar. The implications of these findings are discussed.
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Face-Blind for Other-Race Faces: Individual Differences in Other-Race Recognition Impairments
Lulu Wan et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
We report the existence of a previously undescribed group of people, namely individuals who are so poor at recognition of other-race faces that they meet criteria for clinical-level impairment (i.e., they are "face-blind" for other-race faces). Testing 550 participants, and using the well-validated Cambridge Face Memory Test for diagnosing face blindness, results show the rate of other-race face blindness to be nontrivial, specifically 8.1% of Caucasians and Asians raised in majority own-race countries. Results also show risk factors for other-race face blindness to include: a lack of interracial contact; and being at the lower end of the normal range of general face recognition ability (i.e., even for own-race faces); but not applying less individuating effort to other-race than own-race faces. Findings provide a potential resolution of contradictory evidence concerning the importance of the other-race effect (ORE), by explaining how it is possible for the mean ORE to be modest in size (suggesting a genuine but minor problem), and simultaneously for individuals to suffer major functional consequences in the real world (e.g., eyewitness misidentification of other-race offenders leading to wrongful imprisonment). Findings imply that, in legal settings, evaluating an eyewitness's chance of having made an other-race misidentification requires information about the underlying face recognition abilities of the individual witness. Additionally, analogy with prosopagnosia (inability to recognize even own-race faces) suggests everyday social interactions with other-race people, such as those between colleagues in the workplace, will be seriously impacted by the ORE in some people.
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Persuasive message scrutiny as a function of implicit-explicit discrepancies in racial attitudes
India Johnson et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research has shown that individuals low in prejudice think more carefully when information is from or about stigmatized individuals than non-stigmatized individuals. One explanation for this effect is that the heightened scrutiny stems from a motivation to guard against potential prejudice toward stigmatized others (i.e. "watchdog motivation"). The present research tested a variation of the watchdog hypothesis based on the idea of implicit ambivalence. Specifically, we argue that among individuals low in explicit (i.e., deliberative) prejudice, it is those who are also relatively high in implicit (i.e., automatic) prejudice who will do the most processing in prejudice relevant contexts. The implicit ambivalence framework also makes a novel prediction that individuals who are relatively high in explicit prejudice but low in implicit prejudice would also engage in enhanced information processing. As predicted, people with racial implicit-explicit attitude discrepancies, regardless of the direction of discrepancy, were found to engage in greater of scrutiny of a message about the hiring of Black faculty (study 1), a message about a Black job candidate (study 2), and even when the Black concept was merely primed subliminally prior to reading a race-irrelevant message (study 3).