Proper identification
Subhasish Chowdhury, Joo Young Jeon & Abhijit Ramalingam
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We experimentally investigate the effects of real and minimal identities on group conflict. In turn we provide a direct empirical test of the hypotheses coined by Amartya Sen that the salience of a real identity escalates conflict but that of a mere classification would not do so. In a baseline treatment, two groups - East Asians and Caucasians - engage in a group contest, but information on the racial composition of the groups is not revealed. In the minimal identity treatment each group is arbitrarily given a different color code, whereas in the real identity treatment the race information is revealed. Supporting Sen's hypotheses, we find that compared to the baseline, free-riding declines and conflict effort increases in the real identity treatment but not in the minimal identity treatment. Moreover, this occurs due to an increase in efforts in the real identity treatment by females in both racial groups.
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Racial Resentment and Whites' Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America
Alexandra Filindra & Noah Kaplan
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Our study investigates how and why racial prejudice can fuel white opposition to gun restrictions. Drawing on research across disciplines, we suggest that the language of individual freedom used by the gun rights movement utilizes the same racially meaningful tropes as the rhetoric of the white resistance to black civil rights that developed after WWII and into the 1970s. This indicates that the gun rights narrative is color-coded and evocative of racial resentment. To determine whether racial prejudice depresses white support for gun control, we designed a priming experiment which exposed respondents to pictures of blacks and whites drawn from the IAT. Results show that exposure to the prime suppressed support for gun control compared to the control, conditional upon a respondent's level of racial resentment. Analyses of ANES data (2004-2013) reaffirm these findings. Racial resentment is a statistically significant and substantively important predictor of white opposition to gun control.
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American Football and National Pride: Racial Differences
Tamir Sorek & Robert White
Social Science Research, forthcoming
"We examine the relationship between fandom in football and national pride, as a specific dimension of national identity, with data that we assembled from nationally representative opinion surveys over the period 1981-2014. Aggregating seventy-five opinion polls with questions about football fandom, national pride and race we compare national pride and NFL fandom among white and black Americans in this period...We find that since the early 1980s, national pride has been in decline among American men and women of all races. Among black men, this decline has been especially sharp and it accompanied a marked increase in interest in the NFL. While these findings by themselves may be interpreted as coincidence, our analysis of individual fandom and national pride demonstrates a close relationship that is independent of the well-known predictors of national pride, implying a much deeper affinity. We also find that these ties are strikingly different between whites and African-Americans. The sizable positive association between football fandom and national pride among whites suggests that the football spectacle may facilitate more favorable national sentiment among white fans. The negative association among African-Americans suggests black fans may experience a very different game."
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The Times They Are a-Changing . or Are They Not? A Comparison of Gender Stereotypes, 1983-2014
Elizabeth Haines, Kay Deaux & Nicole Lofaro
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
During the past 30 years, women's participation in the workforce, in athletics, and in professional education has increased, while men's activities have been more stable. Have gender stereotypes changed over this time period to reflect the new realities? And, to what extent does gender stereotyping exist today? We address these questions by comparing data collected in the early 1980s to new data collected in 2014. In each study, participants rated the likelihood that a typical man or woman has a set of gendered characteristics (traits, role behaviors, occupations, and physical characteristics). Results indicate that people perceive strong differences between men and women on stereotype components today, as they did in the past. Comparisons between the two time periods show stability of gender stereotypes across all components except female gender roles, which showed a significant increase in gender stereotyping. These results attest to the durability of basic stereotypes about how men and women are perceived to differ, despite changes in the participation and acceptance of women and men in nontraditional domains. Because gender stereotypes are apparently so deeply embedded in our society, those in a position to evaluate women and men, as well as women and men themselves, need to be constantly vigilant to the possible influence of stereotypes on their judgments, choices, and actions.
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Laura Smart Richman, Alison Blodorn & Brenda Major
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perceived discrimination is associated with increased engagement in unhealthy behaviors. We propose an identity-based pathway to explain this link. Drawing on an identity-based motivation model of health behaviors (Oyserman, Fryberg, & Yoder, 2007), we propose that perceptions of discrimination lead individuals to engage in ingroup-prototypical behaviors in the service of validating their identity and creating a sense of ingroup belonging. To the extent that people perceive unhealthy behaviors as ingroup-prototypical, perceived discrimination may thus increase motivation to engage in unhealthy behaviors. We describe our theoretical model and two studies that demonstrate initial support for some paths in this model. In Study 1, African American participants who reflected on racial discrimination were more likely to endorse unhealthy ingroup-prototypical behavior as self-characteristic than those who reflected on a neutral event. In Study 2, among African American participants who perceived unhealthy behaviors to be ingroup-prototypical, discrimination predicted greater endorsement of unhealthy behaviors as self-characteristic as compared to a control condition. These effects held both with and without controlling for body mass index (BMI) and income. Broader implications of this model for how discrimination adversely affects health-related decisions are discussed.
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Antoine Banks
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that group conflict sets ethnocentric thinking into motion. However, when group threat is not salient, can ethnocentrism still influence people's political decision-making? In this paper, I argue that anger, unrelated to racial and ethnic groups, can activate the attitudes of ethnocentric whites and those that score low in ethnocentrism thereby causing these attitudes to be a stronger predictor of racial and immigration policy opinions. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, or relaxation (unrelated to racial or ethnic groups). The experimental findings show that anger increases opposition to racial and immigration policies among whites that score high in ethnocentrism and enhances support for these policies among those that score low in ethnocentrism. Using data from the American National Election Study cumulative file, I find a similar non-racial/ethnic anger effect. The survey findings also demonstrate that non-racial/ethnic fear increases opposition to immigration among whites that don't have strong out-group attitudes.
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Tattoos, Employment, and Labor Market Earnings: Is There a Link in the Ink?
Michael French et al.
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The popularity of tattooing has increased substantially in recent years, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Moreover, tattooed images are permanent unless the individual opts for expensive, time consuming, and painful removal procedures. Given the increasing popularity of tattooing, and the permanent nature of this action, it is of interest to know whether tattooed workers are more or less likely to be employed and, conditional on employment, if they receive wages that are different from the wages of their non-tattooed peers. To investigate these questions, we analyze two large data sets - from the United States and Australia - with measures of tattoo status, employment, earnings, and other pertinent variables. Regardless of country, gender, specific measures, or estimation technique, the results consistently show that having a tattoo is negatively and significantly related to employment and earnings in bivariate analyses, but the estimates become smaller and nonsignificant after controlling for human capital, occupation, behavioral choices, lifestyle factors, and other individual characteristics related to labor market outcomes. Various robustness checks confirm the stability of the core findings. These results suggest that, once differences in personal characteristics are taken into account, tattooed and non-tattooed workers are treated similarly in the labor market. We offer suggestions for improving future surveys to enable a better understanding of the relationships between tattooed workers and their labor market outcomes.
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The threat of racial progress and the self-protective nature of perceiving anti-White bias
Clara Wilkins et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies we tested whether racial progress is threatening to Whites and whether perceiving anti-White bias assuages that threat. Study 1 revealed that Whites primed with racial progress exhibited evidence of threat (lower implicit self-worth relative to baseline). Study 2 replicated the threat effect from Study 1 and examined how perceiving discrimination may buffer Whites' self-worth. After White participants primed with high racial progress attributed a negative event to their race, their implicit self-worth rebounded. Participants primed to perceive low racial progress did not experience fluctuations in implicit self-worth. Furthermore, among those primed with high racial progress, greater racial discounting (attributing rejection to race rather than to the self) was associated with greater self-worth protection. These studies suggest that changes to the racial status quo are threatening to Whites and that perceiving greater racial bias is a way to manage that threat.
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The Voiced Pronunciation of Initial Phonemes Predicts the Gender of Names
Michael Slepian & Adam Galinsky
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although it is known that certain names gain popularity within a culture because of historical events, it is unknown how names become associated with different social categories in the first place. We propose that vocal cord vibration during the pronunciation of an initial phoneme plays a critical role in explaining which names are assigned to males versus females. This produces a voiced gendered name effect, whereby voiced phonemes (vibration of the vocal cords) are more associated with male names, and unvoiced phonemes (no vibration of the vocal cords) are more associated with female names. Eleven studies test this association between voiced names and gender (a) using 270 million names (more than 80,000 unique names) given to children over 75 years, (b) names across 2 cultures (the U.S. and India), and (c) hundreds of novel names. The voiced gendered name effect was mediated through how hard or soft names sounded, and moderated by gender stereotype endorsement. Although extensive work has demonstrated morphological and physical cues to gender (e.g., facial, bodily, vocal), this work provides a systematic account of name-based cues to gender. Overall, the current research extends work on sound symbolism to names; the way in which a name sounds can be symbolically related to stereotypes associated with its social category.
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Beyond Black and White: Biracial Attitudes in Contemporary U.S. Politics
Lauren Davenport
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The 2000 U.S. census was the first in which respondents were permitted to self-identify with more than one race. A decade later, multiple-race identifiers have become one of the fastest-growing groups in the nation. Such broadening multiracial identification poses important political ramifications and raises questions about the future of minority group political solidarity. Yet we know little about the opinions of multiple-race identifiers and from where those opinions emerge. Bridging literatures in racial politics and political socialization, and drawing upon a multimethod approach, this article provides insight into the consequences of the U.S.'s increasingly blurred racial boundaries by examining the attitudes of Americans of White-Black parentage, a population whose identification was traditionally constrained by the one-drop rule. Findings show that on racial issues such as discrimination and affirmative action, biracials who identify as both White and Black generally hold views akin to Blacks. But on nonracial political issues including abortion and gender/marriage equality, biracials who identify as White-Black or as Black express more liberal views than their peers of monoracial parentage. Being biracial and labeling oneself a racial minority is thus associated with a more progressive outlook on matters that affect socially marginalized groups. Two explanations are examined for these findings: the transmission of political outlook from parents to children, and biracials' experiences straddling a long-standing racial divide.
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Jonathan Freeman, Kristin Pauker & Diana Sanchez
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two national samples, we examined the influence of interracial exposure in one's local environment on the dynamic process underlying race perception and its evaluative consequences. Using a mouse-tracking paradigm, we found in Study 1 that White individuals with low interracial exposure exhibited a unique effect of abrupt, unstable White-Black category shifting during real-time perception of mixed-race faces, consistent with predictions from a neural-dynamic model of social categorization and computational simulations. In Study 2, this shifting effect was replicated and shown to predict a trust bias against mixed-race individuals and to mediate the effect of low interracial exposure on that trust bias. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that interracial exposure shapes the dynamics through which racial categories activate and resolve during real-time perceptions, and these initial perceptual dynamics, in turn, may help drive evaluative biases against mixed-race individuals. Thus, lower-level perceptual aspects of encounters with racial ambiguity may serve as a foundation for mixed-race prejudice.
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Eyelid-Openness and Mouth Curvature Influence Perceived Intelligence Beyond Attractiveness
Sean Talamas et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Impression formation is profoundly influenced by facial attractiveness, but the existence of facial cues which affect judgments beyond such an "attractiveness halo" may be underestimated. Because depression and tiredness adversely affect cognitive capacity, we reasoned that facial cues to mood (mouth curvature) and alertness (eyelid-openness) affect impressions of intellectual capacity. Over 4 studies we investigated the influence of these malleable facial cues on first impressions of intelligence. In Studies 1 and 2 we scrutinize the perceived intelligence and attractiveness ratings of images of 100 adults (aged 18-33) and 90 school-age children (aged 5-17), respectively. Intelligence impression was partially mediated by attractiveness, but independent effects of eyelid-openness and subtle smiling were found that enhanced intelligence ratings independent of attractiveness. In Study 3 we digitally manipulated stimuli to have altered eyelid-openness or mouth curvature and found that each independent manipulation had an influence on perceptions of intelligence. In a final set of stimuli (Study 4) we explored changes in these cues before and after sleep restriction, to examine whether natural variations in these cues according to sleep condition can influence perceptions. In Studies 3 and 4 variations with increased eyelid-openness and mouth curvature were found to relate positively to intelligence ratings. These findings suggest potential overgeneralizations based on subtle facial cues that indicate mood and tiredness, both of which alter cognitive ability. These findings also have important implications for students who are directly influenced by expectations of ability and teachers who may form expectations based on initial perceptions of intelligence.
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Conflict and the Ethnic Structure of the Marketplace: Evidence from Israel
Asaf Zussman
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
How and why does ethnic conflict affect the ethnic structure of the marketplace? To answer these questions, this paper merges a unique administrative dataset covering the universe of transactions in the Israeli market for used cars during 1998-2010 with data on the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The analysis shows that violence reduces the number of transactions between Arab sellers and Jewish buyers while increasing the number of transactions between Arab sellers and Arab buyers; violence has no effect on the number of transactions involving Jewish sellers. I relate these findings to the economic literature studying the sources of discrimination.
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Social Status Attainment and Racial Category Selection in the Contemporary United States
Robert DeFina & Lance Hannon
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerous studies have shown that individuals can change how they racially self-identify over time, potentially in response to changes in educational and occupational attainment. The value of that evidence is somewhat diminished, however, by reliance on survey questions about racial identity that are inconsistent over time. This study offers new evidence based on the 2008-2012 General Social Survey panel, which uses a consistent question about self-declared race throughout. Those data are used to estimate transition tables and fixed effects panel models, in which an individual's probability of choosing a racial category depends on social status indicators. We find that, on average, fluctuations in an individual's income, educational attainment and employment status are not significantly related to changes in racial self-identity in the contemporary United States. These results obtain for the total sample and for populations that historically have been more likely to change (Hispanics, Native Americans and individuals who identify as multi-racial). Implications for theory and policy are discussed.
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On implicit racial prejudice against infants
Lukas Wolf et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Because of the innocence and dependence of children, it would be reassuring to believe that implicit racial prejudice against out-group children is lower than implicit prejudice against out-group adults. Yet, prior research has not directly tested whether or not adults exhibit less spontaneous prejudice toward child targets than adult targets. Three studies addressed this issue, contrasting adults with very young child targets. Studies 1A and B revealed that participants belonging to an ethnic majority group (White Europeans) showed greater spontaneous favorability toward their ethnic in-group than toward an ethnic out-group (South Asians), and this prejudice emerged equally for infant and adult targets. Study 2 found that this pattern occurred even when race was not a salient dimension of categorization in the implicit measure. Thus, there was a robust preference for in-group children over out-group children, and there was no evidence that this prejudice is weaker than that exhibited toward adults.
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Danielle Berke et al.
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Theory suggests that men respond to situations in which their gender status is threatened with emotions and behaviors meant to reaffirm manhood. However, the extent to which threats to masculine status impact gender role discrepancy (perceived failure to conform to socially prescribed masculine gender role norms) has yet to be demonstrated empirically. Nor has research established whether gender role discrepancy is itself predictive of engagement in gender-stereotyped behavior following threats to gender status. In the present study, we assessed the effect of threats to masculinity on gender role discrepancy and a unique gender-shaped phenomenon, pain tolerance. Two-hundred twelve undergraduate men were randomly assigned to receive feedback that was either threatening to masculine identity or nonthreatening. Over the course of the study, participants also completed measures of gender role discrepancy, emotion activation, and objectively measured pain tolerance. Results indicated that gender threat predicted increased self-perceived gender role discrepancy and elicited aggression, but not anxiety-related cognitions in men. Moreover, gender-threatened men evinced higher pain tolerance than their nonthreatened counterparts. Collectively, these findings provide compelling support for the theory that engagement in stereotyped masculine behavior may serve a socially expressive function intended to quell negative affect and realign men with the status of "manhood."