Younger Americans are less politically polarized than older Americans about climate policies (but not about other policy domains).

Political polarization of Americans' support for climate policies often impedes the adoption of new, urgently needed climate solutions. However, recent polls suggest that younger conservatives favor adopting pro-climate policies to a greater degree than older conservatives, resulting in less political polarization among younger Americans relative to older Americans. To better understand these patterns, we analyzed Americans' support for various climate policies from 1982-2020, across 16 waves of historical, nationally representative survey data from the American National Election Studies (total N = 29,467). Regression models consistently show that, since 2012, younger Americans have been less politically polarized than older Americans on support for climate policies. Before 2012 and on non-climate policy topics, we did not find consistent statistical evidence for political polarization varying with age. These findings can inform policy debates about climate change and offer hope to environmentalists and policymakers who seek to build broad consensus for climate action at the policy level.

Is Men's Heterosexuality Perceived as More Precarious Than Women's? An Intersectional, Race-by-Gender Analysis.

People perceive men's masculinity to be more precarious, or easier to lose, than women's femininity. In the present article, we investigated (a) whether men's heterosexuality is likewise perceived to be more precarious than women's, and if so, (b) whether this effect is exaggerated when the targets in question are Black rather than White. To investigate these questions, we conducted three experiments (one of which was conducted on a probability-based sample of U.S. adults; total N = 3,811) in which participants read about a target person who either did or did not engage in a single same-sex sexual behavior. Results revealed that participants questioned the heterosexuality of men more than the heterosexuality of women when they engaged (vs. did not engage) in same-sex sexual behavior. Surprisingly, these effects were not moderated by whether targets were Black versus White. Results are interpreted in light of recent models of intersectional stereotyping.

Political (Meta-)Dehumanization in Mental Representations: Divergent Emphases in the Minds of Liberals Versus Conservatives.

We conducted two reverse-correlation studies, as well as two pilot studies reported in the online supplement (total N = 1,411), on the topics of (a) whether liberals and conservatives differ in the types of dehumanization that they cognitively emphasize when mentally representing one another, and if so, (b) whether liberals and conservatives are sensitive to how they are represented in the minds of political outgroup members. Results suggest that partisans indeed differ in the types of dehumanization that they cognitively emphasize when mentally representing one another: whereas conservatives' dehumanization of liberals emphasizes immaturity (vs. savagery), liberals' dehumanization of conservatives more strongly emphasizes savagery (vs. immaturity). In addition, results suggest that partisans may be sensitive to how they are represented. That is, partisans' meta-representations-their representations of how the outgroup represents the ingroup-appear to accurately index the relative emphases of these two dimensions in the minds of political outgroup members.

Are leaders still presumed white by default? Racial bias in leader categorization revisited.

In the United States, leaders of the highest valued companies, best-ranked universities, and most-consumed media outlets are more likely to be White than what would be expected based on White people's representation in the U.S. population. One explanation for this racial gap is that U.S. respondents' prototype of a leader is White by default-which is, in turn, what causes White (vs. non-White) people to be promoted up the organizational ladder more quickly. Although this explanation has empirical support, its central premise was recently challenged by experimental evidence documenting that U.S. respondents no longer associate leaders, more than nonleaders, with being White. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,316) on the topic of whether leaders, more than nonleaders, continue to be associated with Whiteness (i.e., being categorized as White or being represented with stereotypically White qualities). Results suggest that associations between leaders and Whiteness hold up to scrutiny, but that detecting them may depend on what methods researchers employ. In particular, when researchers use direct methods of detecting racial assumptions (e.g., self-report measures), there appears to be no evidence of an association between leaders and Whiteness (Experiment 1). Yet, when researchers use more indirect methods of detecting racial assumptions (e.g., a Princeton trilogy task), an association between leaders and Whiteness readily emerges (Experiments 2 and 3). In short, although respondents refrain from freely expressing associations they may harbor between leaders and Whiteness, these associations do not appear to have dissipated with time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 123(4) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2023-02979-003). In the article, a coding error that impacted the results of Experiments 2a and 2b has been corrected, and the supplemental material and Figures 3 and 4 have also been updated. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person's multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds-identity-specific schemas for categorizing others-and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets' racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets' other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Blatant dehumanization in the mind's eye: Prevalent even among those who explicitly reject it?

Research suggests that some people, particularly those on the political right, tend to blatantly dehumanize low-status groups. However, these findings have largely relied on self-report measures, which are notoriously subject to social desirability concerns. To better understand just how widely blatant forms of intergroup dehumanization might extend, the present article leverages an unobtrusive, data-driven perceptual task to examine how U.S. respondents mentally represent "Americans" versus "Arabs" (a low-status group in the United States that is often explicitly targeted with blatant dehumanization). Data from 2 reverse-correlation experiments (original N = 108; preregistered replication N = 336) and 7 rating studies (N = 2,301) suggest that U.S. respondents' mental representations of Arabs are significantly more dehumanizing than their representations of Americans. Furthermore, analyses indicate that this phenomenon is not reducible to a general tendency for our sample to mentally represent Arabs more negatively than Americans. Finally, these findings reveal that blatantly dehumanizing representations of Arabs can be just as prevalent among individuals exhibiting low levels of explicit dehumanization (e.g., liberals) as among individuals exhibiting high levels of explicit dehumanization (e.g., conservatives)-a phenomenon into which exploratory analyses suggest liberals may have only limited awareness. Taken together, these results suggest that blatant dehumanization may be more widespread than previously recognized and that it can persist even in the minds of those who explicitly reject it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).