Representations Of Social Categories Research Articles

Exemplar-based ingroup projection: The superordinate national category is associated more strongly with ingroup than outgroup political leaders

We studied mental representations of social categories in the context of political groups nested within national identities. Extending previous works derived from the Ingroup Projection Model, which had investigated category representations based on prototypical attributes, we examined category representations based on prototypical exemplars, focusing on group leaders. We hypothesized that the mental representation of the superordinate, national, category is more strongly associated with the mental representation of ingroup political leaders than outgroup political leaders. We tested our hypothesis in three preregistered experiments, looking at two different national-political contexts and using diverse methods. In Studies 1 (N = 145) and 2 (N = 103), both conducted in Israel, we found that participants explicitly associated the national category with leaders of their own political camp more than with leaders of the rival political camp. In Study 2, we further found that participants were more likely to falsely remember that ingroup relative to outgroup political leaders were paired with the national category (versus their political wing). In Study 3 (N = 381), conducted in the USA, we found using an implicit measure of association (ST-IAT) that Democrats and Republicans sorted stimuli, representing political leaders, faster when the national category (represented by American symbols) was paired with the ingroup rather than the outgroup category. Implications for theoretical accounts of ingroup projection, as well as for the understanding of political polarization and intergroup leadership, are discussed.

Reframing social categorization as latent structure learning for understanding political behaviour.

Affiliating with political parties, voting and building coalitions all contribute to the functioning of our political systems. One core component of this is social categorization-being able to recognize others as fellow in-group members or members of the out-group. Without this capacity, we would be unable to coordinate with in-group members or avoid out-group members. Past research in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience examining social categorization has suggested that one way to identify in-group members may be to directly compute the similarity between oneself and the target (dyadic similarity). This model, however, does not account for the fact that the group membership brought to bear is context-dependent. This review argues that a more comprehensive understanding of how we build representations of social categories (and the subsequent impact on our behaviours) must first expand our conceptualization of social categorization beyond simple dyadic similarity. Furthermore, a generalizable account of social categorization must also provide domain-general, quantitative predictions for us to test hypotheses about social categorization. Here, we introduce an alternative model-one in which we infer latent groups of people through latent structure learning. We examine experimental evidence for this account and discuss potential implications for understanding the political mind. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

The Development of Intersectional Social Prototypes

Race and gender information overlap to shape adults’ representations of social categories. This overlap may contribute to the psychological “invisibility” of people whose race and gender identities are perceived to have conflicting stereotypes. The present research (N = 249) examined when race begins to bias representations of gender across development. Children and adults engaged in a speeded task in which they categorized photographs of faces of women and men from three racial categories: Asian, Black, and White (four photographs per gender and racial group). In Study 1, participants were slower to categorize photographs of Black women as women than photographs of White and Asian women as women and Black men as men. They also were more likely to miscategorize photographs of Black women as men and less likely to stereotype Black women as feminine. Study 2 replicated these findings and provided evidence of a developmental shift in categorization speed. An omnibus analysis provided a high-powered test of this developmental hypothesis, revealing that target race begins biasing children’s gender categorization around age 5. Implications for the development of social-category representation are discussed.

Representations of childhood in Greek language school textbooks: from rural to urban childhood

ABSTRACT The study explores the representations of childhood in Greek language school textbooks for primary second graders within a broad chronological period, from 1934 to date. School textbooks are understood as social representations of social categories and social phenomena which Greek pupils are assumed to embed. Drawing from the “new sociology of childhood” which perceives childhood as a social construction we examine the representations of childhood in school textbooks concerning their positioning in different contexts, namely the rural versus urban contexts of children’s lives. Childhood representations are analysed through a thematic analysis of texts. Findings show different representations of childhood in rural and urban contexts that however change during the course of time. Representations of childhood in rural contexts construct a perception of a homogeneous, deficit, “adult-to-be” childhood, either evil or innocent, but mainly close to John Locke’s conception of the “immanent child”. On the other hand, as time goes by, and particularly after the 1980s, childhood images construct a dominant image of urban childhood, which depicts children as spontaneous, free to take the initiative and enact their interests relating in this way to the tribal childhood discourse with references to an agentic childhood. Overall, our findings show that childhood is not represented as an unchangeable continuum but its construction is affected by changes observed in the time period over which textbooks are written.

Beliefs About Moral Obligation Structure Children's Social Category-Based Expectations.

Young children view social category members as morally obligated toward one another, and expect these obligations to shape people's social behavior. The present work investigates how children specify which behaviors are constrained by social categories in this way. In two studies (N=128), 4- and 5-year-old children predicted that morally positive behaviors would be directed toward in-group members, and that morally negative behaviors would be directed toward out-group members, but did not hold equally strong expectations about behaviors described as positive or negative for reasons irrelevant to morality. Thus, notions of morality are embedded within children's representations of social categories, such that when learning about novel moral norms, children immediately expect those obligations to uniquely hold within social groups.

The development of structural thinking about social categories.

Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking pink") in structural terms, locating an object of explanation within a larger structure and identifying structural constraints that act on elements of the structure. We show that children as young as 3-4 years old show signs of structural thinking, and that 5-6-year-olds show additional differentiation between structural and nonstructural thinking, yet still fall short of adult performance. These findings introduce structural connections as a new type of nonaccidental relationship between a property and a category, and present a viable alternative to internalist accounts of social categories, such as psychological essentialism. (PsycINFO Database Record

A review of multiracial malleability: Identity, categorization, and shifting racial attitudes

AbstractThe majority of social perception research to date has focused on perceptually obvious and prototypical representations of social categories. However, not all people belong to social categories that are easily discernable. Within the past decade, there has been an upsurge of research demonstrating that multifaceted identities (both one's own and perceptions of others' identities) influence people to think about social categories in a more flexible manner. Here, we specifically review research on multiracial identity and perceptions of multiracial individuals as 2 domains where researchers have documented evidence of the flexible nature of social identities and social categorization. Integrating frameworks that argue race is a dynamic and interactive process, we provide evidence that studying multiracial perceivers and targets helps reveal that race changes across situations, time, and depending on a number of top‐down factors (e.g., expectations, stereotypes, and cultural norms). From the perspective of multiracial individuals as perceivers, we review research showing that flexible identity in multiracial individuals influences the process of social perception driven by a reduced belief in the essential nature of racial categories. From the perspective of multiracial individuals as targets, we review research that top‐down cues influence the racial categorization process. We further discuss emerging work that reveals that exposure to multiracial individuals influences beliefs surrounding the categorical (or noncategorical) nature of race, itself. Needed directions for future work are discussed.

Conceptual centrality and implicit bias

How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus onsalientorstatistical associationsbetween target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in thedependency networksthat are part of our representations of social categories. Dependency networks encode information about how features in a conceptual representation depend on each other. This information determines the degree of centrality of a feature for a conceptual representation. Importantly, centrally encoded biases systematically disassociate from those encoded in salient‐statistical associations. Furthermore, the degree of centrality of a feature determines its cross‐contextual stability: in general, the more central a feature is for a concept, the more likely it is to survive into a wide array of cognitive tasks involving that concept. Accordingly, implicit biases that are encoded in the central features of concepts are predicted to be more resilient across different tasks and contexts. As a result, the distinction between centrally encoded and salient‐statistical biases has important theoretical and practical implications.

Representations of Social Categories in an EFL Textbook Used at a Private Colombian University

Nowadays textbooks are the focal materials used in language classes. Therefore, following the methods of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this research report analyzes the ideological discourse present in an EFL textbook used at the languages center of a private Colombian university in order to determine how it portrays the members of the English speaking world, according to the social categories they belong to. The findings reveal that the ideological positions regarding the English speaking world displayed in the textbook divide the social categories into insiders and outsiders of this world. This division that is textually supported through the use of certain discursive strategies, might go beyond the written text itself and permeate wider Colombian societal practices that include discrimination at different levels and in consequence, could have a possible negative impact on the identity construction of Colombian EFL learners and teachers. Key words: Discourse historical approach, identity, investment, social categories, textbooks.

Cognitive Components of Ingroup Projection

This research investigated whether relative ingroup prototypicality (i.e., the tendency to perceive one’s own ingroup as more prototypical of a superordinate category than the outgroup) can result from a prototype-based versus exemplar-based mental representation of social categories, rather than from ingroup membership per se as previously suggested by the ingroup projection model. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a prototype-based group was perceived as more prototypical of a superordinate category than an exemplar-based group supporting the hypothesis that an intergroup context is not necessary for biased prototypicality judgments. Experiment 3 introduced an intergroup context in a minimal-group-like paradigm. The findings demonstrated that both the kind of cognitive representation and motivational processes contribute to biased prototypicality judgments in intergroup settings.

Does the Mask Govern the Mind?: Effects of Arbitrary Gender Representation on Quantitative Task Performance in Avatar-Represented Virtual Groups

Virtual environments employing avatars for self-representation-including the opportunity to represent or misrepresent social categories-raise interesting and intriguing questions as to how one's avatar-based social category shapes social identity dynamics, particularly when stereotypes prevalent in the offline world apply to the social categories visually represented by avatars. The present experiment investigated how social category representation via avatars (i.e., graphical representations of people in computer-mediated environments) affects stereotype-relevant task performance. In particular, building on and extending the Proteus effect model, we explored whether and how stereotype lift (i.e., a performance boost caused by the awareness of a domain-specific negative stereotype associated with outgroup members) occurred in virtual group settings in which avatar-based gender representation was arbitrary. Female and male participants (N=120) were randomly assigned either a female avatar or a male avatar through a process masked as a random drawing. They were then placed in a numerical minority status with respect to virtual gender-as the only virtual female (male) in a computer-mediated triad with two opposite-gendered avatars-and performed a mental arithmetic task either competitively or cooperatively. The data revealed that participants who were arbitrarily represented by a male avatar and competed against two ostensible female avatars showed strongest performance compared to others on the arithmetic task. This pattern occurred regardless of participants' actual gender, pointing to a virtual stereotype lift effect. Additional mediation tests showed that task motivation partially mediated the effect. Theoretical and practical implications for social identity dynamics in avatar-based virtual environments are discussed.

Categorizing others and the self: How social memory structures guide social perception and behavior

In keeping with the special issue theme of “Remembering the Future,” this article provides a selective review of research on how memory for social information (i.e., social category representation) influences future processing and behavior. Specifically, the authors focus on how categorization and stereotyping affect how we perceive others and ourselves. The first part of the article reviews research on how individuals perceive others. The authors review research on the determinants and outcomes of social categorization and stereotype activation, concluding with the influence of ingroup/outgroup categorization on face processing. The second part of the article reviews research on how individuals perceive themselves. The authors argue that stereotype threat—concerns about being judged or behaving in ways that confirm negative group stereotypes, leading to poor performance—is the result of both self-categorization and stereotype activation. Overall, the article highlights the complex relationship between memory for social category information and future social perception and behavior.

The Influence of Competition on Children's Social Categories

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that information about intergroup competition is central to children's representations of social categories. Children (N = 99, 5- and 6-year-olds) were introduced to two novel social categories, which were described as having competing or noncompeting goals, by varying the quantity of a resource in which both groups were interested. When groups had competing (as compared with noncompeting) goals, children expected category membership to more strongly constrain prosocial and antisocial behaviors, viewed category membership as more fundamental to identity, were more likely to reference categories to explain behavior, and viewed categories as characterized by unique social obligations. Results further indicated that children reliably inferred when goals were competing versus noncompeting based on information about resource quantity. Implications for the conceptual systems that support the development of social categorization are discussed.

Development of Social Category Representations: Early Appreciation of Roles and Deontic Relations

Three experiments explored the significance of deontic properties (involving rights and obligations) in representations of social categories. Preschool-aged children (M = 4.8), young school-aged children (M = 8.2), and adults judged the centrality of behavioral, psychological, and deontic properties for both familiar (Experiments 1 and 2, Ns = 50 and 52, respectively) and novel (Experiment 3, N = 64) social categories. Preschool-aged children were the most consistent in treating deontic properties as central: Knowing a person's social category membership was more informative about obligations than about behavioral frequencies or psychological preferences. Adults treated deontic properties as central to some categories but also recognized a set that was primarily predictive of psychological dispositions. The results argue for the significance of deontic properties in the development of social cognition.

Essentialism, Power, and the Representation of Social Categories: A Folk Sociology Perspective

This paper synthesizes two perspectives on essentialism: cognitive and social. The cognitive essentialist perspective argues that our bias to appeal to the psychological belief that categories have innate essences enables us to make inferences about social categories such as race, caste, and gender. The social essentialist perspective argues that essentialist thinking serves the needs of those in power to justify existing social and economic hierarchies. Examining the relationship between essentialism and power, this paper expands the framework for folk sociology, incorporating cognitive and social essentialist accounts to examine folk theories of social differences between caste, race, gender, and class, with a particular emphasis on social marginality and cultural narratives. Further, this paper discusses the relevance of the folk sociology perspective to the study of children’s emerging understanding of their social world.

Essentializing Differences Between Women and Men

People represent many social categories, including gender categories, in essentialist terms: They see category members as sharing deep, nonobvious properties that make them the kinds of things they are. The present research explored the consequences of this mode of representation for social inferences. In two sets of studies, participants learned (a) that they were similar to a member of the other gender on a novel attribute, (b) that they were different from a member of the other gender on a novel attribute, or (c) just their own standing on a novel attribute. Results showed that participants made stronger inductive inferences about the attribute in question when they learned that it distinguished them from a member of the other gender than in the other conditions. We consider the implications of these results for the representation of social categories and for everyday social inference processes.

Memberships in a superordinate level: re-thinking European Union as a multi-national society

This paper attempts to understand how people give meaning to the social categories they belong to in the context of superordinate group formation. The context of investigation is the European Integration. Participants were Greek and French nationals aged between 28 and 50. First, the lay theories within which the social categories acquire their meaning were investigated through the analysis of qualitative data. 37 open-ended interviews (19 French, 18 Greek participants) were analysed using an interpretative phenomenological approach (Smith et al., 1999). Second, a questionnaire type study investigated the perception of the status-position of each national group (n = 293, French 145, Greeks 148). It is argued that, within commonly shared theories about European integration, the status-position of the subgroups guides the selection of elements upon which different representations of social categories are constructed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Do children have a theory of race?

In recent years a number of studies have detailed young children's enriched, domain-specific, and theory-like understanding in several cognitive domains, including naive biology, naive psychology, and reasoning about physical objects. With few exceptions, students of cognition have not considered the possibility that the acquisition and representation of social categories may also be governed by a specialized faculty for understanding. Rather, most accounts of children's social categorization assume that the classification of the human realm is derived from observations of superficial differences in appearance and does not include expectations of deeper commonalities among category members. Five experiments are reported that challenge this view. The results indicate that young children's inferences about human racial variation involve domain-specific reasoning that parallels but is distinct from common sense understanding of naive biology. These findings have implications for our understanding of the transfer of knowledge across domains and for determining the appropriate level of description of domain-specific devices.

Use of Mental Frequency Distributions to Represent Variability Among Members of Social Categories

We propose an alternative model of social category representation that suggests people use mental frequency distributions to remember and organize instances along an attribute dimension. We then explore the implications of this model for explaining differences in perceived group variability, including the out-group homogeneity effect. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that using a greater number of categories to represent a dimension results in greater perceived variability of a group along that dimension. Experiment 2 shows that subjects spontaneously generate more subgroups (that is, a greater number of categories) along an attribute dimension when judging the in-group as compared to the out-group. Taken together, these experiments demonstrate how the use of a frequency distribution model might account for out-group homogeneity. If subjects use a frequency distribution to represent group members along a dimension, and they divide out-groups into a fewer number of categories than in-groups, then out-groups will be perceived to be less variable than in-groups.

Social Categorization and the Representation of Variability Information

We present two models of social category representation, one exemplar-based and one abstraction-based. We examine these with respect to five factors that influence the magnitude of perceived variability: actual level of variability among group members, dependent measures used by experimenters, encoding effects, retrieval effects, and increasing familiarity with group members.