Abstract
Social categorizations divide people into “us” and “them”, often along continuous attributes such as political ideology or skin color. This division results in both positive consequences, such as a sense of community, and negative ones, such as group conflict. Further, individuals in the middle of the spectrum can fall through the cracks of this categorization process and are seen as out-group by individuals on either side of the spectrum, becoming inbetweeners. Here, we propose a quantitative, dynamical-system model that studies the joint influence of cognitive and social processes. We model where two social groups draw the boundaries between “us” and ‘them” on a continuous attribute. Our model predicts that both groups tend to draw a more restrictive boundary than the middle of the spectrum. As a result, each group sees the individuals in the middle of the attribute space as an out-group. We test this prediction using U.S. political survey data on how political independents are perceived by registered party members as well as existing experiments on the perception of racially ambiguous faces, and find support.
Highlights
Social categorization is a necessary and ubiquitous human social behavior, occurring on many attributes including race, gender, sexual orientation, and political ideology [1]
We focus on how Democrats and Republicans perceive those in the middle of the liberal-conservative attribute space
We propose a dynamical system model that integrates cognitive and social processes to arrive at social categorizations
Summary
Social categorization is a necessary and ubiquitous human social behavior, occurring on many attributes including race, gender, sexual orientation, and political ideology [1]. In this paper we propose a quantitative, dynamical system model of social categorization that integrates cognitive and social processes It predicts where category boundaries are placed and the occurrence of inbetweeners. These models have been successful in explaining and predicting many complex social phenomena [24], such as the extinction of minority languages [25], the decline of religious affiliation [26], the polarization in the U.S Congress [27], and changes in party memberships in the UK [28] In this model, the process of creating social category boundaries is influenced by individual-level cognitive processes and social processes. After we present the mathematical model and its predictions, we present some preliminary empirical validation from the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset and compare our results with findings from human behavior experiments
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