Social Category Membership Research Articles

Following community norms or an internal compass? The role of prospective leaders' social category membership in the differential effects of authentic and ethical leadership on stereotype threat.

Increasing racial diversity in organizations remains a challenge, as stereotype threat undermines the performance and career aspirations of minority group members during job recruitment. The present study examines how prospective leaders can leverage their influence on their followers' identities to mitigate the stereotype threat Black individuals face in this context. We explore the effects of two moral leadership styles (ethical vs. authentic) on stereotype threat in the context of recruitment. Specifically, we investigate whether prospective leaders' ingroup status moderates the relationship between ethical versus authentic leadership styles and candidates' stereotype threat during the selection process and candidates' willingness to join the organization. To this end, we conducted four experiments with Black residents of Brazilian favelas (impoverished neighborhoods), two of which included real-world job recruitment processes and physiological measures of stress (i.e., salivary cortisol and blood pressure). The results indicate that when the prospective leaders are from the outgroup, displaying ethical leadership by relying on community norms is more helpful in reducing Black candidates' threat and, in turn, promotes willingness to apply for the job. In contrast, when the leader is from the ingroup, displaying authentic leadership by emphasizing the importance of an internal moral compass is more helpful in reducing threat, and this effect is mediated by the identity process of inclusion of the leader in the self. Overall, the present study suggests that prospective direct supervisors have the critical ability to reduce stereotype threat, which can negatively affect Black applicants and their desire to join organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Intergroup processes and the happy face advantage: How social categories influence emotion categorization.

There is abundant evidence that emotion categorization is influenced by the social category membership of target faces, with target sex and target race modulating the ease with which perceivers can categorize happy and angry emotional expressions. However, theoretical interpretation of these findings is constrained by gender and race imbalances in both the participant samples and target faces typically used when demonstrating these effects (e.g., most participants have been White women and most Black targets have been men). Across seven experiments, the current research used gender-matched samples (Experiments 1a and 1b), gender- and racial identity-matched samples (Experiments 2a and 2b), and manipulations of social context (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) to establish whether emotion categorization is influenced by interactions between the social category membership of perceivers and target faces. Supporting this idea, we found the presence and size of the happy face advantage were influenced by interactions between perceivers and target social categories, with reliable happy face advantages in reaction times for ingroup targets but not necessarily for outgroup targets. White targets and female targets were the only categories associated with a reliable happy face advantage that was independent of perceiver category. The interactions between perceiver and target social category were eliminated when targets were blocked by social category (e.g., a block of all White female targets; Experiments 3a and 3b) and accentuated when targets were associated with additional category information (i.e., ingroup/outgroup nationality; Experiment 4). These findings support the possibility that contextually sensitive intergroup processes influence emotion categorization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Following Community Norms or an Internal Compass? The Role of Prospective Leaders’ Social Category Membership in the Differential Effects of Authentic and Ethical Leadership on Stereotype Threat

Supplemental Material for Following Community Norms or an Internal Compass? The Role of Prospective Leaders’ Social Category Membership in the Differential Effects of Authentic and Ethical Leadership on Stereotype Threat

A Constructivist Perspective on Empirical Discrimination Research

Contemporary scholars view race as a constructed social category, not a biological fact. Yet most empirical discrimination research treats race no differently than other individual characteristics typically observed in data. This article considers the implications of adopting a constructivist perspective instead. I develop a simple model where agents use observable characteristics to both interpret membership in racial social categories and make decisions. Discrimination is the result of acting based on perceived social identity. The model highlights the need to measure the racial “first stage”—the social identity contrast between individuals—instead of relying on race as coded in data, and draws a novel distinction between race-based and direct statistical discrimination. I illustrate some implications using data on wages, speech patterns, and skin color and conclude with strategies for future research that build on the constructivist model. (JEL J15, J31, J71, K38)

Teenagers' but not young adults' beliefs about intrinsic interpersonal obligations for group members.

Previous research has indicated that children perceive social category members as having intrinsic obligations toward each other, which shape their expectations for social interactions. However, it is unclear whether teenagers (aged 13 to 15) and young adults (aged 19 to 21) continue to hold such beliefs, given their increased experience with group dynamics and external social rules. To explore this question, three experiments were conducted with a total of 360 participants (N = 180 for each age group). Experiment 1 examined negative social interactions using different methods in two sub-experiments, while Experiment 2 focused on positive social interactions to examine whether participants viewed social category members as intrinsically obligated to avoid harming each other and to offer assistance. Results revealed that teenagers evaluated within-group harm and non-help as unacceptable, regardless of external rules, whereas they viewed between-group harm and non-help as both acceptable and unacceptable, depending on the presence of external rules. Conversely, young adults considered both within-group and between-group harm/non-help as more acceptable if an external rule permitted such behavior. These findings suggest that teenagers believe that members of a social category are intrinsically obligated to help and not harm each other, whereas young adults believe that individual social interactions are constrained mainly by external rules. That is, teenagers hold stronger beliefs than young adults about intrinsic interpersonal obligations to group members. Thus, in-group moral obligations and external rules contribute differently to the evaluation and interpretation of social interactions at different developmental stages.

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.

How cues to social categorization impact children's inferences about social categories

Social categorization involves two crucial processes: First, children seek properties on which they can categorize individuals, i.e., they learn to form social categories; then children make inferences based on social category membership and might develop affective responses toward social categories. Over the last decade, a growing number of research in developmental psychology started to use novel social categories to investigate how children learn and reason about social categories. To date, three types of cues have been put forward as means to form social categories, namely linguistic, visual, and behavioral cues. Based on social category membership, children draw inferences about the shared properties of social category members and about how social category members ought to behave and interact with each other. With additional input, children might apply essentialist beliefs to social categories and develop affective responses toward social categories. This article aims to provide key insights on the development of stereotypes and intergroup biases by reviewing recent works that investigated how children learn to form novel social categories and the kind of inferences they make about these novel social categories.

Enacting the babushka: older Russian women ‘doing’ age, gender and class by accepting the role of a stoic carer

AbstractThis article contributes to the debates about age-based practices of distinction that produce stable notions about the subjectivities of members of social categories and the social consequences of such categorisations for the subject. In Russia, a strong expectation that grandmothers will prioritise helping their adult daughters with child care and housework over their careers and personal lives shaped the social position of the babushka, an unpaid family carer dependent on the state and her children. When women can no longer maintain meaningful post-pension-age employment, they see the babushka figure as the dominant option on which to model their identities. Drawing on 20 biographical interviews with women aged 60 and over, the article explores their tactics of performing their ‘gendered age’ in various classed ways. The babushka identity encompasses two broad strategies of self-presentation: taking control over one's life by emphasising that it is one's deliberate choice to live as a post-professional and post-sexual subject, and downplaying one's own needs while contributing to the wellbeing of others. The article shows that for older Russian women who face sexism, ageism and the stigmatisation of poverty, denying their vulnerability to systemic marginalisation is a familiar way of seeking recognition and maintaining their sense of self-worth. It advances the empirical exploration of the agentic component of vulnerability by revealing how the denial of (inter)dependence is presupposed by the conditions of subject-formation.

Elites on Equality: Room for Gender Balance and Ethnic Diversity in Leadership Positions?

Access to resources, wealth, and power positions varies systematically with membership in social categories. This article asks what role the elites themselves – as holders of power and regulators of access to influential positions – can play in maintaining, but also changing, the demographic composition of elites. Drawing on a unique survey among the entire Norwegian elite, we investigate what holders of elite positions believe are the main causes of gender imbalance and lack of ethnic diversity, and whether their beliefs influence their willingness to implement measures to promote gender equality and ethnic diversity. In line with expectations drawn from the literatures on policy representation and critical frame analysis, we find a strong, positive relationship between the belief in the importance of institutionalized causes of inequality and the willingness to introduce ameliorative measures to increase diversity. Conversely, we find a negative relationship between the belief in individualized explanations, such as the lack of qualifications, and the willingness to introduce measures. As elites are key holders of power, the findings imply that how elites view the causes of categorical inequality has strong bearings on the room for structural change.

Religious Group Identities in Genocide: Social Identity Theory as a Tool for Disentangling Law and Religion

ABSTRACT Everyone has multiple intersecting identities and belongs to several groups. In cases of genocide, how do courts deal with intersecting identities? Are they relevant for the identification of the victims? This paper argues that social identity theory may assist in the legal interpretation of the ‘religious group’ of the law of genocide where individuals are targeted for their – perceived or real –membership of a competing religious group. According to the theory, personal (religious) identity is based on membership in significant social categories that lead to ‘us versus them’ dichotomies, favouring the in-group over the out-group. Identity competition plays a central role in the inception and escalation of intergroup conflicts, including those that occur along religious fault lines. Genocide is a type of intergroup conflict but is not usually framed as such by international criminal lawyers. This paper discusses social identity theory, intergroup conflict, religion, and the case law on genocide. In exploring the relevance of social identity theory for the law of genocide, it argues that the current jurisprudential approach of blending group membership criteria, based on the ‘four corners’ approach, is flawed. The cases of Rwanda, the Former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, India, and Myanmar exemplify the relevance of the theory.

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.

The Vicious Cycle Linking Stereotypes and Social Roles

Members of social categories defined by attributes such as sex, race, and age occupy certain types of social roles much more than members of other social categories do. The qualities that define these roles become associated with the category as a whole, thus forming a stereotype. In a vicious cycle, this stereotype then hinders category members’ movement into roles with different demands because their stereotype portrays them as well matched to their existing roles but not to these new roles. This vicious cycle has important implications for stereotype change. Given the difficulties of producing enduring change by directly attacking stereotypes in the minds of individuals, a more effective strategy consists of policies and programs that change the distributions of category members in roles, thereby changing stereotypes at their source. If the vicious cycle is not interrupted by such social change, observations of category members’ typical social roles continually reinstate existing stereotypes.

Türkiye’den Bir Örneklemde Cinsiyet, Irk ve Dile Dayalı Esasçı Düşüncenin Gelişimi

Developmental studies suggest that children think in essentialist terms about social categories and view social category membership as natural and stable. This study aims to examine 6-to-10-year-old children’s essentialist views about gender, race, and language in a sample from Turkey. These are all categories with underlying perceptual markers, but they are likely to differ in terms of their cultural relevance within this context. In addition to these categories, essentialist beliefs about sports team fans were also examined as a reference category. A measure that captures different aspects of essentialist thinking including biology, change, and environment, and was previously used to study essentialist beliefs about different social categories in the same cultural context with a similar age group, was used. The results showed that around the age of 6 years, children did not distinguish among various social categories in their essentialist reasoning; however, with age, they gradually distinguished among some categories. Despite the differences in their cultural relevance within the context of Turkey, gender and race showed very similar patterns in how they were essentialized over age, both overall, and also with respect to different individual dimensions related to essentialist thinking. Essentialist thinking about both of these categories remained relatively stable across age. In terms of language, while overall essentialism scores remained stable across age, a substantial decrease in beliefs about capacity for changing one’s group membership was observed across age, when membership is based on language. Finally, children’s essentialist thinking about sports team fans decreased considerably with age. These findings are discussed in light of previous studies focusing on these categories in contexts, where the cultural saliency of the categories likely differ, in an attempt to offer a better understanding of the mechanisms contributing to the development of social essentialism.

'I know you shouldn't compare to other people, but I can't do anything most people can': Age, family and occupation categorisations in men's reasoning about their anxiety in an online discussion forum.

Despite its prevalence, men's anxiety is arguably under-researched and poorly understood. The present study explores the reasoning provided by male posters to an online discussion forum about the source of their anxiety. Posts were collected from an Australian anxiety online discussion forum. This study utilises discursive psychology, informed by principles of membership categorisation analysis, to describe how age, occupation and family-related identities can be invoked within common sense reasoning about the source of male anxiety. References to various identity categories were routinely employed by male forum posters in their representations of themselves, in order to describe the source of their anxiety in terms of a contrast between how they are, and how they should be. In examining accounts of anxiety and responses to those accounts, we can trace cultural knowledge about issues regarding men, masculinity and anxiety that those accounts make relevant. Findings illustrate how men's descriptions of the source of their anxiety should be understood as culturally bound and related to expectations and obligations associated with their social context and category memberships. By enhancing understandings of how men describe the source of their anxiety, this study offers insight into improving the identification and engagement of men experiencing anxiety in health services.

A Functional Coupling of Brain and Behavior During Social Categorization of Faces.

Considerable research has focused on how people derive information about others' social category memberships from their faces. Theoretical models posit that early extraction of task-relevant information from a face should determine the efficiency with which that face is categorized, but evidence supporting this idea has been elusive. Here, we used a novel trial-level data analytic approach to examine the relationship between two event-related potential components-the P2, indexing early attention to category-relevant information, and the P3, indexing stimulus evaluation-and the speed of overt categorization judgments. As predicted, a larger face-elicited P2 on a particular trial was associated with faster overt race or gender categorization of that face. Moreover, this association was mediated by P3 latency, indicating that extraction of more category-relevant information early in processing facilitated stimulus evaluation. These findings support continuous flow models of information processing and the long-theorized functional significance of face-elicited neurophysiological responses for social categorization.

The straight categorization bias: A motivated and altruistic reasoning account.

For 70 years, the field of social perception has concluded that perceivers can determine others' social category memberships with remarkable accuracy. However, it has become increasingly clear that accuracy is only part of the story, as social category judgments are often systematically biased toward one category over another. For example, when categorizing sexual orientation, perceivers label others as straight more often than gay. This straight categorization bias is reliable, has an effect size larger than that for accuracy, and is not exclusively driven by the low base rate of sexual minorities in the population, yet we know little about its proximal causes. Here, we argue that one facet of this bias is a motivated reasoning process that avoids applying stigmatizing labels to unknown others. Specifically, we propose that perceivers ascribe heavy consequences to incorrect gay categorizations, compelling them to gather and integrate available information in a manner that favors straight categorizations. Studies 1 and 2 tested the dynamic nature of the bias, exploring decision ambivalence and the real-time accrual of visible evidence about a target throughout the perceptual process using mouse-tracking and diffusion modeling. Studies 3-5 tested motivational determinants for the bias, revealing that perceivers associate high costs with incorrect gay categorizations because those errors put other people in harm's way. Studies 6-9 tested the cognitive mechanisms perceivers engage as they search for information that allows them to avoid costly decision errors. Collectively, these studies provide a new framework for understanding a well-documented but poorly understood response bias in social categorization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Nostalgia Proneness and the Collective Self.

In two studies, we examined the association between nostalgia proneness (i.e., trait-level nostalgia) and importance of the collective self. In Study 1, we tested and supported the hypothesis that nostalgia proneness is positively correlated with relational collectivism, which entails an emphasis on one’s connections with close others and small social networks. In Study 2, we demonstrated that nostalgia proneness is also positively correlated with group collectivism, which emphasizes one’s membership in more abstract, larger social groups or categories, and was reflected in increased identification with a national ingroup. These findings offer insight into the nature of nostalgia proneness—a consequential and stable personality trait.

How origin stories shape children’s social reasoning

How do we explain the behavior of the many people we meet throughout our lives? Children and adults sometimes consider other people in terms of their social category memberships (e.g., assuming that a girl likes pink because she is a girl), but people view some categories as more informative than others, and which people think of as informative varies across cultural contexts. One type of culturally-embedded knowledge that appears to shape whether people view particular categories as providing explanations for behavior are beliefs about how the category came to be. In the current studies with 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 206), we ask how learning about quasi-scientific or supernatural causal origins of a category shapes young children’s use of categories to predict and explain what category members are like. In Study 1, children more often used a category to explain behavior when they heard the category described as intentionally created by a powerful being than when they heard no explicit information about its origins. In Studies 2 and 3, learning about both quasi-scientific and supernatural causal origins shaped children’s social category beliefs via a common mechanism: by signaling that the category marked a non-arbitrary way of dividing up the social world.

Towards Anti-Deficit Education in Undergraduate Mathematics Education: How Deficit Perspectives Work to Structure Inequality and What Can Be Done About It

A deficit perspective is a propensity to locate the source of academic problems in deficiencies within students, their families, their communities, or their membership in social categories (such as race and gender). While the deficit perspective is a common topic of discussion in K–12 mathematics education, it is a much rarer topic of discussion in undergraduate mathematics education. I argue that undergraduate mathematics instructors should take the deficit perspective seriously, because it structures educational experiences for students and instructors. In this survey article, I provide a brief review of the literature on deficit perspectives in mathematics education, and I offer practical suggestions for education from an anti-deficit perspective.

Gender Bias in Collaborative Medical Decision Making: Emergent Evidence

This initial, exploratory study on gender bias in collaborative medical decision making examined the degree to which physicians' reliance on a team member's patient care advice differs as a function of the gender of the advice giver. In 2018, 283 anesthesiologists read a brief, online clinical vignette and were randomly assigned to receive treatment advice from 1 of 8 possible sources (physician or nurse, man or woman, experienced or inexperienced). They then indicated their treatment decision, as well as the degree to which they relied upon the advice given.The results revealed 2 patterns consistent with gender bias in participants' advice taking. First, when treatment advice was delivered by an inexperienced physician, participants reported replying significantly more on the advice of a man versus a woman, F(1,61) = 4.24, P = .04. Second, participants' reliance on the advice of the woman physician was a function of her experience, F(1,62) = 6.96, P = .01, whereas reliance on the advice of the man physician was not, F(1,60) = 0.21, P = .65.These findings suggest women physicians, relative to men, may encounter additional hurdles to performing their jobs, especially at early stages in their careers. These hurdles are rooted in psychological biases of others, rather than objective features of cases or treatment settings. Cultural stereotypes may shape physicians' information use and decision-making processes (and hinder collaboration), even in contexts that appear to have little to do with social category membership. The authors recommend institutions adopt policies and practices encouraging equal attention to advice, regardless of the source, to help ensure advice taking is a function of information quality rather than the attributes of the advice giver. Such policies and practices may help surface and implement diverse expert perspectives in collaborative medical decision making, promoting better and more effective patient care.