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

PUBLIC ABSTRACT: 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. Specifically, people will pay attention to dimensions to the degree that the conclusions produced from using those dimensions align with their motivations. Overall, we suggest that simply examining the downstream effects of social categorization like stereotyping and prejudice is not enough, and that research should look earlier in the process at how and when we form the categories on which those stereotypes are based.

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. We discuss the implications of this work both for practical matters around use of the IAT and for theoretical debates on the conceptualization of valence in implicit attitudes.

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. First, when information gain is contingent on approaching the target, avoidance restricts the information available with which to update one's beliefs. Second, computational models that consider the perceiver's full reinforcement history demonstrate that avoidance directly reinforces itself, such that initial avoidance of group members increases the probability of later acts of avoidance toward that group. Finally, we find initial evidence for a potential dissociation between behavior and explicit beliefs, with avoidance reinforcing avoidant behaviors without necessarily affecting self-reported beliefs. Overall, these results suggest that avoidance behaviors toward members of social groups can perpetuate inaccurate negative beliefs and expectations about those groups, such that initial interactions with a group have a compounding effect on overall impressions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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. In Study 2, we find that theories regarding the other person's intentions influence the degree of prosociality that participants exhibit, even when no opportunity for direct reciprocity exists. Further, beliefs about the other's intentions are closely related to one's own motivations in the task. Together, the results support a model in which prosociality depends on both the social conditions for mutual exchange and a mental model of how others will behave within these conditions, which is closely related to knowledge of the self.

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.