Multiple Social Categories Research Articles

Cooperation and crossed categorization in a minimal group context: testing the bounded generalized reciprocity and social identity accounts

ABSTRACT Individuals display the tendency to cooperate more with in-group members than they do with out-group members (i.e. in-group favoritism) across diverse contexts. While previous studies have thoroughly investigated in-group favoritism when a single social category is salient, they have understudied how individuals cooperate with others when multiple social categories are simultaneously salient. To bridge this gap, we conducted a study to examine cooperation under crossed categorization, in which two dichotomous social categories are orthogonally crossed. We then examined the psychological mechanisms potentially underlying intergroup cooperation, including reputational concern, expected cooperation, and social identification, drawn from the theoretical perspectives of bounded generalized reciprocity and social identity theory. Overall, we found that two in-group memberships additively increased cooperation. That is, cooperation with a double in-group member (a person with two in-group memberships) was higher than that with a partial in-group member (i.e. a person with one in-group membership and one out-group membership). We also found that cooperation with a partial in-group member was larger than that with a double out-group member (a person with two out-group memberships). In addition, we found some evidence that expected cooperation partially mediated the relationship between in-group membership and cooperation.

Operationalization of (Trans)gender in Facial Recognition Systems: From Binarism to Intersectionality

ABSTRACTIn a paper published in 2018, Os Keyes investigated how the literature on Automated Gender Recognition systems (AGRs) conceived gender, finding that 94.8% of the papers treated it as binary, 72.4% as immutable and 60.3% as a physiological component. In the author's view, this is indicative of an operationalization of gender, that is, the assumption that the latter is a discrete and objectively applicable parameter. Keyes claims that such a vision is blind to the performative aspects of gender and particularly dangerous for transgender people. Here I will follow on these remarks, providing several examples that show how AGR systems' failures in recognizing the faces of transgender people are capable of both perpetuating and amplifying gender stereotypes and inequalities. Then, I will introduce the notion of intersectionality, which is the idea that humans ‘sit at the crossroads’ of many physical, social, and political factors, whose combination generates dynamics of discrimination or privilege. I will focus on a subfield of intersectional studies, that is, intersectional stereotyping, which explains how we usually make assumptions and judgments about an individual or group of people based on multiple social identities or categories they belong to, such as their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion and ability. I will argue that this area of research provides us with a set of knowledge that might help us rethink and redesign the data sets for AGR. Specifically, I will draw on three key notions of intersectional stereotyping—‘perceiver goals’, ‘category accessibility’ and ‘category fit’—and use them to envision new ways of collecting images for assessing gender through facial recognition. Finally, I will explicate why my observations call for an urgent integration between computer science and gender studies.

Mrs. Dalloway and the Shecession: The Interconnectedness and Intersectionalities of Care Ethics and Social Time During the Pandemic

Business ethics researchers and practitioners are interested in understanding the temporal mechanisms of various managerial activities, processes, and policies. In this direction, I borrow notions of time from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to examine how social time intersperses with the paid and (unpaid) care work of female employees during the pandemic. I explore how discussions of social time in connection to care work appear in newspaper discourses of “shecession”, i.e. the large-scale job/income losses experienced by women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since shecession is a byproduct of the pandemic times, exploring the role of time in it is crucial. In fact, my findings show that the macro social time of the pandemic affects working women with care responsibilities who are situated at the intersection of multiple vulnerable social categories by simultaneously being a penalizer and a lost opportunity. Similarly, I also find that the micro social times of working women embed, stratify, and synchronize differently during the pandemic when compared to normal times. Working women with care responsibilities are thus adversely affected by both micro and macro social time changes. My findings, therefore, could be instrumental in developing and implementing inclusive policies and processes in business organizations and labor markets. In so doing, my study also indicates how a consideration of social time enriches the application of care ethics in work contexts. Ultimately, this article is also about developing caring organizations, societies, and families which care for the caregivers (working women), since receiving care is a precondition of giving care.

Ritual networks and the structure of moral communities in Classic Maya society

Ritual plays an important integrative function in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human society. The shared experience of ritual establishes strong bonds between individuals that defines their membership in certain social groups. However, rituals are not timeless traditions, nor do they simply restore social equilibrium. Rather, rituals are active and ongoing social processes that unite and divide across multiple social categories. This paper applies archaeological network methods to analyze the multiscalar structure of ritual traditions across Classic Maya (ca. 300–900 CE) society using hieroglyphic inscriptions from dated and provenienced monuments cataloged in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991–2024). For the Classic Maya, public ritual and performance were highly charged political events where meaning and power could be negotiated, creating opportunities for identity formation and community integration. Such contexts helped establish strong moral bonds in Classic Maya society. However, we know relatively little about the specific forms and content of these ritual practices. In this study we construct ritual similarity networks from hieroglyphic inscriptions to analyze the structure and organization of these moral communities as well as the ritual relations that bound them together.

Embedding Reflexivity in Social Work Research through the Critical Reflexive Framework

Abstract Following the global pandemic, there is a need for more cross-national social work research which speaks to the increased and widespread, intra and international, effects of global social phenomenon. Achieving this aim requires social work researchers to be responsive to the intersection of complex lives, complicated problems and dynamic structural contexts. It is, therefore, important that researchers recognise how their identity and positionality within the research project spans several terrains such as social, political and value systems, as well as integrating multiple social categories and social roles. However, a review of the existing literature shows that the lack of conceptual guidance for ‘doing’ reflexivity means that researchers can sometimes pay insufficient attention to the influence that they have on the people and topic being studied. Drawing on the combined concepts of identity, translocational positionality and epistemic privilege, we aim to strengthen conceptual guidance by advancing the Critical Reflexive Framework (CRF). Following an illustrated example of the CRF, we argue for its widespread adoption to enhance the rigour, integrity and quality of social work research. We conclude that such high-quality research is essential to promote the emancipatory elements of social work practice which occurs in contexts of complexity, uncertainty and flux.

Cross-modal representation of identity in the primate hippocampus.

Faces and voices are the dominant social signals used to recognize individuals among primates. Yet, it is not known how these signals are integrated into a cross-modal representation of individual identity in the primate brain. We discovered that, although single neurons in the marmoset hippocampus exhibited selective responses when presented with the face or voice of a specific individual, a parallel mechanism for representing the cross-modal identities for multiple individuals was evident within single neurons and at the population level. Manifold projections likewise showed the separability of individuals as well as clustering for others' families, which suggests that multiple learned social categories are encoded as related dimensions of identity in the hippocampus. Neural representations of identity in the hippocampus are thus both modality independent and reflect the primate social network.

Caregiving Among Older Black Same-Gender-Loving Women During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Findings From Qualitative Research.

Few data on caregiving during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic use an intersectional lens to attend to how multiple social categories, such as gender, age, race, and sexual orientation, shape caregiving experiences. This analysis sought to explore caregiving experiences of aging Black same-gender-loving women. Sixteen focus groups were conducted with 4-8 participants each (N = 102) from across the United States. Audio-recorded discussions lasted for approximately 90 min and were transcribed verbatim. Two analysts coded transcripts for discussions related to caregiving and used content analysis to identify themes. Participants engaged in caregiving for children, parents, family, friends, and neighbors. They provided physical, economical, instrumental, and/or secondary caregiving; and sometimes received care themselves. The pandemic heavily affected their stress level and mental health as well as their intimate partner relationships. Discussions mostly offered descriptions of increased caregiving difficulty caused by the pandemic. However, a few participants identified ways the pandemic made caregiving easier; changed caregiving without making it easier or harder; or thwarted their ability to provide care. Older Black same-gender-loving women described some pandemic caregiving experiences that diverged from the existing literature, demonstrating the importance of considering how gender, race, age, and sexual orientation affect caregiving experiences during a pandemic fraught with health inequities. Ensuring the multiply marginalized caregivers have access to the practical and emotional support they need is critical for advancing health equity and preparing for future pandemics.

At the Intersection: The Influence of Race on Women’s Leadership Self-Efficacy Development

Leadership self-efficacy (LSE), one’s beliefs in their own ability, knowledge, and skills in leading others effectively, can play a large role in how individuals develop and perform as leaders. Understanding the dynamics of LSE growth may be particularly important when considering the development of female leaders. The institutional barriers and gender inequities experienced by women can change the trajectory of their course to leadership; however, the ways in which the course changes likely differ as a function of intersecting identities. Rather than presume all women share common leadership development opportunities and experiences, we contend that women’s LSE is informed by experiences unique to their racial and ethnic backgrounds. According to intersectionality theory, individuals are part of multiple social categories that can shape their experiences. In the current paper, we focus on how the intersection of gender and race influence the development of LSE across the life span for White, Black, Asian American women, and Latinas. Integrating social cognitive theory with intersectionality theory, we explore how gendered and racialized experiences prior to and during adulthood shape women’s leadership self-efficacy. We also discuss ways that organizations can help reduce and counteract negative consequences of barriers to LSE for different women.

Educational Inequalities at the Intersection of Multiple Social Categories: An Introduction and Systematic Review of the Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) Approach

Intersectional approaches have become increasingly important for explaining educational inequalities because they help to improve our understanding of how individual experiences are shaped by simultaneous membership in multiple social categories that are associated with interconnected systems of power, privilege, and oppression. For years, there has been a call in psychological and educational research for quantitative approaches that can account for the intersection of multiple social categories. The present paper introduces the Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) approach, a novel intersectional approach from epidemiology, to study educational inequalities. The MAIHDA approach uses a multilevel model as the statistical framework to define intersectional strata that represent individuals’ membership in multiple social categories. By partitioning the variance within and between intersectional strata, the MAIHDA approach allows identifying intersectional effects at the strata level as well as obtaining information on the discriminatory accuracy of these strata for predicting individual educational outcomes. Compared to conventional quantitative intersectional approaches, MAIHDA analyses have several advantages, including better scalability for higher dimensions, model parsimony, and precision-weighted estimates of strata with small sample sizes. We provide a systematic review of its past application and illustrate its use by analyzing inequalities in reading achievement across 40 unique intersectional strata (combining the social categories of gender, immigrant background, parental education, and parental occupational status) using data from 15-year-old students in Germany (N = 5451). We conclude that the MAIHDA approach is a valuable intersectional tool to study inequalities in educational contexts.

Relationship between intersectionality and cancer inequalities: a scoping review protocol

IntroductionPersistent inequalities in cancer care and cancer outcomes exist within and between countries. However, the evidence pertaining to the root causes driving cancer inequalities is mixed. This may be explained...

When voice signals nationality and sexual orientation: Speakers’ self-perceptions and perceived stigmatization

Research has shown that individuals speaking low-prestige language varieties are often negatively evaluated and stigmatized by others. However, less is known about how speakers of such language varieties perceive their own speech. Here, we examined self-perceptions and perceived stigma of speakers who belong to multiple social categories signaled by auditory cues. Specifically, we examined beliefs of sexual minority and heterosexual male speakers who were either British nationals (native English speakers) or foreigners living in the UK (non-native English speakers). British speakers believed their voices cue their nationality more than foreigners. Heterosexuals believed their voices reveal their sexual orientation, but only when they self-perceived as sounding masculine. Sexual minority and foreign speakers felt more stigmatized because of the way they sound than did heterosexual and British speakers, respectively. These findings have implications for intergroup communication and voice-based stigmatization literature.

An intersectional life-course perspective on Black women’s smoking trajectories

Attempting to address health disparities via a single analytical category (e.g., gender or race) overlooks the complex ways multiple social categories and institutions intersect to create health disparities. Grounded in the intersectional life-course perspective, this study examines how the lived experiences of gender, race, and class, and interlocking systems of oppression shape Black women's smoking trajectories. Black women exhibit a unique smoking trajectory compared to others: the onset of smoking occurs later but they have an increased likelihood of smoking over their life course. Nevertheless, despite this distinctive smoking trajectory and disproportionately higher smoking-related health issues among Black smokers, few qualitative studies investigate their smoking patterns. This qualitative research fills that gap by applying an intersectional life-course perspective and grounded theory. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with socioeconomically disadvantaged Black women who were current and former smokers, this study identifies the following smoking trajectories among the study participants: early onset of experimental smoking, intermittent smoking in adolescence, and daily smoking in young adulthood. Additionally, data indicates three life-course pathways through which the transition from intermittent to daily smoking occurs: (a) social norms surrounding smoking; (b) financial (in)dependence; and, (c) gendered, raced, and classed stressors. These pathways intertwine and can co-occur. Findings suggest considering diverse life-course patterns of smoking across the intersections of gender, race, class, and socio-geographical contexts in future research and policies.

Intersectional Disparities in Youth Tobacco Use by Sexual and/or Gender Minority Status and Race and/or Ethnicity.

The current study applied an intersectional lens to examine societal factors, individual psychological outcomes, and youth combustible tobacco and vape use at the intersection of sexual and/or gender minority (SGM) status and race and/or ethnicity. Data were drawn from 133 969 youth respondents surveyed in the 2019-2020 California Student Tobacco Survey, a representative school-based survey of 8th and 10th-grade public school students throughout California. The impact of multiple marginalized group membership using four mutually exclusive intersectional positions (non-SGM white, SGM white, racial minority only, and both SGM and racial minority), in addition to specific differences across ten SGM by race and/or ethnicity groups (e.g. non-SGM black or African American, SGM black or African American, etc.) were assessed. Compared to heterosexual and cisgender white youth, SGM and racial minority adolescents were shown to experience poorer school tobacco education quality and cessation support, lower school and family connectedness, and higher anxiety and depression symptoms. SGM and racial minority youth had a higher prevalence of ever-combustible tobacco use but were less likely to be current vape users compared to non-SGM white respondents. In examining specific group differences, results revealed that SGM teens had the highest risk of ever combustible tobacco use. This disparity was amplified for those belonging to multiple marginalized groups, with black or AA SGM teens evidenced to be at the highest risk of current combustible tobacco. Information from this study has useful implications for SGM measurement in surveillance systems and highlights the usefulness of adopting an intersectional approach to inform equity-driven public health policy and intervention. This representative study of California youth supports that identifying as a sexual and/or gender minority (SGM) is an important risk factor for combustible tobacco use. Particularly, observed SGM disparities were magnified for the youth belonging to marginalized groups, as black or African American SGM teens were shown to be at the highest risk of current combustible tobacco use. Findings support that Intersectionality Theory represents a useful framework for examining tobacco-related disparities and underscores the importance of assessing how the intersection of multiple social categories impacts youth tobacco use.

An intersectional approach to understanding the inequality and subordination of Sri Lankan women apparel workers

Contrary to the feminist research based on exclusively gendered processes of inequality in organisations, intersectionality theorists propose an intersectional approach to understanding the inequalities and subordination experienced by Global South women factory workers representing different social hierarchies and experiencing diverse social realities. This paper contributes to the literature by bringing empirical evidence from the Sri Lankan apparel industry to inform the inequality and subordination of women in Global South factory floors from an intersectional perspective. A qualitative methodology using data generated through interviews with women shop floor-level apparel workers who work in export processing zones (EPZs) and village areas was adopted to explore the interplay between multiple social categories (gender, poverty, and rurality) influenced by broader power structures (patriarchy and capitalism) as well as political inequalities in determining the inequalities and subordination of women workers in globalised apparel factories. Further, we consider how gendered and class-based factory processes produce and reproduce the inequalities and subordination of these women at work. The analysis identifies that workers' rural origins, poverty, and traditionally defined gendered roles have worked interactively in favour of capitalist industrialists by pushing these women workers to lower-paid manual jobs in the apparel industry. The factories utilise cheap, material-based incentives and recruitment systems for rewarding and recruiting shop floor workers, capitalising on their poverty, rurality and gender-based requirements as a source of exploitation. In addition, factory managers' behaviours create certain beliefs in these women workers, favouring the factories, resulting in the further subordination of these women through perceived cohesiveness or compliance. Finally, this paper concludes that capitalism, together with patriarchy, creates unequal and subordinated positions for poor, rural women through their collective agendas of wealth maximisation.
 Keywords: Inequality, Intersectionality, Sri Lankan apparel industry, Subordination, Women workers

Doing Un/Troubled Subject Positions as a Transgender Woman with Autism

This paper aims to capture in/exclusion processes in one transgender person’s life, a person who is also diagnosed with autism. We do this through Staunæs’ (2005) concept of troubling subjectivities, which helps us to explore how one specific person, Vera, ‘does’ or negotiates her identities as a neurodiverse transgender woman. We pay particular attention to how the two categories of transgender and autism intersect and which in/exclusion processes they set in motion. In this way, we unfold how identifying as transgender and having been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder shape Vera’s life. Specifically, we aim to unveil how these two social categories shape her degree of agency in her private social relations and in institutional settings of both education and healthcare. This is important to explore for two reasons: a) the intersections of multiple social categories change the conditions under which someone is allowed to do their particular personhood in different social settings, and b) research shows that a significant number of transgender people also inhabit the clinical category of autism. We show, that while Vera is able to perform identities related to the categories of transgender and autism in personally empowering ways, she is at the same time obstructed by what we refer to as identity overwork. That is, others’ positioning of Vera as ‘troubled’, repeatedly requires her response, on multiple social levels and in various contexts.

Why Developmental Research on Social Categorization Needs Intersectionality

AbstractChildren develop rich concepts of social categories throughout early and middle childhood. Whereas we know much about the development and consequences of many social categories individually, we know less about the development of representations at the intersection of multiple categories—for instance, how children think about race and gender together. This is a critical issue because every person a child meets holds membership in multiple social categories. Thus, overlooking how children integrate information about multiple categories causes a major gap in our understanding of the development of social cognition. An intersectional framework, which considers both how group‐based bias is expressed toward people with one versus multiple minoritized identities and how power structures shape these processes, can help address this issue. In this article, we review research on children's use of race and gender, and describe how an intersectional framework can address gaps in knowledge and advance both equity and theory.

Theoretical considerations for the development of urban black adolescent females

ABSTRACT We explore the theoretical frameworks of ecological systems theory, intersectionality, and multi-dimensionality to examine the dynamics of the environment as it relates to the development of Black adolescent females who grow up in urban settings. Frameworks such as intersectionality and multi-dimensionality specifically urge attention to multiple identities and social categories related to race, sex, and class that impact the everyday life for people of color. We argue negotiations regarding multiple identities are unique for Black adolescent females. It is important to explore these frameworks as developmental processes are impacted by navigating systems and power dynamics that may stifle the developmental process for Black adolescent females. This review specifically addresses barriers and milestones unique to urban Black adolescent female development that targets 21st century challenges. Implications for social workers at each ecological domain are discussed.

Nationality dominates gender in decision-making in the Dictator and Prisoner's Dilemma Games.

Across a variety of contexts, adults tend to cooperate more with ingroup members than outgroup members. However, humans belong to multiple social groups simultaneously and we know little about how this cross-categorization affects cooperative decision-making. Nationality and gender are two social categories that are ripe for exploration in this regard: They regularly intersect in the real world and we know that each affects cooperation in isolation. Here we explore two hypotheses concerning the effects of cross-categorization on cooperative decision-making. First, the additivity hypothesis (H1), which proposes that the effects of social categories are additive, suggesting that people will be most likely to cooperate with partners who are nationality and gender ingroup members. Second, the category dominance hypothesis (H2), which proposes that one category will outcompete the other in driving decision-making, suggesting that either nationality or gender information will be privileged in cooperative contexts. Secondarily, we test whether identification with-and implicit bias toward-nationality and gender categories predict decision-making. Indian and US Americans (N = 479), made decisions in two cooperative contexts-the Dictator and Prisoner's Dilemma Games-when paired with partners of all four social categories: Indian women and men, and US American women and men. Nationality exerted a stronger influence than gender: people shared and cooperated more with own-nationality partners and believed that own-nationality partners would be more cooperative. Both identification with-and implicit preferences for-own-nationality, led to more sharing in the Dictator Game. Our findings are most consistent with H2, suggesting that when presented simultaneously, nationality, but not gender, exerts an important influence on cooperative decision-making. Our study highlights the importance of testing cooperation in more realistic intergroup contexts, ones in which multiple social categories are in play.

The effect of perceptual load on the processing of multiple social categories in face

The aim of this study is to explore the processing features of the multi-social categories and their mechanisms of interaction. Adopting the Inhibition Paradigm in experiment 1, this study investigated whether the race and gender information obtained from images of face would influence the judgment of name category under the different perceptual load levels. The results of two sub-experiments showed that facial features contained strong, intuitive clues for race category. When the perceptual load level was low, it was automatically processed whether it was related to the task or not; when the perceptual load level was high, the automated process did not occur. The gender category utilized top-down flexible processing, which could be affected easily by the intent of the task. It was not processed when it was irrelevant to the task. Experiment 2 further proved that the different levels of difficulty would not have impact on the results of experiment 1. In summary, this study suggests that the race category is an automatic process from the bottom to up, which affects the processing of irrelevant primitive social categories; and that gender processing is regulated by the task intention, exhibiting top-down processing characteristics without affecting the processing of irrelevant primary social categories. Therefore, it can be concluded that there is an asymmetry in the interaction of the primary social categories.

How accent and gender influence perceptions of competence and warmth in the medical profession

Previous research has shown that we evaluate social categories differently based on the two fundamental dimensions of competence and warmth. Findings indicate that doctors, men and standard accents are perceived as more competent, while nurses, women and regional accents are perceived as warmer. In a short experiment manipulating gender (man; woman), occupation (doctor; nurse) and accent (Standard British English; regional accent), participants rated the targets on perceived competence, warmth and status. The main results showed that doctors were rated as more competent providing they spoke using Standard British English, and warmer, as long as they spoke with a regional accent. This poses a potential problem, as doctors need to be perceived as competent in their diagnoses and treatment decisions, but also warm in their communication of important and sensitive information. The implications of these findings are discussed in order to highlight the importance of using multiple social categories to represent the complexity of everyday interactions.