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"Hewstone, Miles"
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Overlap in processing advantages for minimal ingroups and the self
Cognitive biases shape our perception of the world and our interactions with other people. Information related to the self and our social ingroups is prioritised for cognitive processing and can therefore form some of these key biases. However, ingroup biases may be elicited not only for established social groups, but also for minimal groups assigned by novel or random social categorisation. Moreover, whether these ‘ingroup biases’ are related to self-processing is unknown. Across three experiments, we utilised a social associative matching paradigm to examine whether the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the effects of minimal groups overlapped with those that prioritise the self, and whether minimal group allocation causes early processing advantages. We found significant advantages in response time and sensitivity (
d
prime) for stimuli associated with newly-assigned ingroups. Further, self-biases and ingroup-biases were positively correlated across individuals (Experiments 1 and 3). However, when the task was such that ingroup and self associations competed, only the self-advantage was detected (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate that even random group allocation quickly captures attention and enhances processing. Positive correlations between the self- and ingroup-biases suggest a common cognitive mechanism across individuals. These findings have implications for understanding how social biases filter our perception of the world.
Journal Article
Building Social Cohesion Through Intergroup Contact: Evaluation of a Large-Scale Intervention to Improve Intergroup Relations Among Adolescents
Past research has found intergroup contact to be a promising intervention to reduce prejudice and has identified adolescence as the developmental period during which intergroup contact is most effective. Few studies, however, have tested whether contact-based interventions can be scaled up to improve intergroup relations at a large scale. The present research evaluated whether and when the National Citizen Service, a large-scale contact-based intervention reaching one in six 15- to 17-year-olds in England and Northern Ireland, builds social cohesion among adolescents from different ethnic backgrounds. In a diverse sample of adolescents (N = 2099; Mage = 16.37, age range: 15–17 years; 58% female), this study used a pretest–posttest design with a double pretest to assess the intervention’s effectiveness. Controlling for test–retest effects, this study found evidence that the intervention decreased intergroup anxiety and increased outgroup perspective-taking—but not that it affected intergroup attitudes, intergroup trust, or perceptions of relative (dis-)advantage. These (small) effects were greater for adolescents who had experienced less positive contact before participating and who talked more about group differences while participating. These findings suggest that the intervention might not immediately improve intergroup relations—but that it has the potential to prepare adolescents, especially those with less positive contact experiences before the intervention, for more positive intergroup interactions in the future.
Journal Article
Humans adapt to social diversity over time
Humans have evolved cognitive processes favoring homogeneity, stability, and structure. These processes are, however, incompatible with a socially diverse world, raising wide academic and political concern about the future of modern societies. With data comprising 22 y of religious diversity worldwide, we show across multiple surveys that humans are inclined to react negatively to threats to homogeneity (i.e., changes in diversity are associated with lower self-reported quality of life, explained by a decrease in trust in others) in the short term. However, these negative outcomes are compensated in the long term by the beneficial influence of intergroup contact, which alleviates initial negative influences. This research advances knowledge that can foster peaceful coexistence in a new era defined by globalization and a socially diverse future.
Journal Article
Online Engagement Between Opposing Political Protest Groups via Social Media is Linked to Physical Violence of Offline Encounters
The rise of the Internet and social media has allowed individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to communicate with one another in an open and largely unstructured way. One important question is whether the nature of online engagements between groups relates to the nature of encounters between these groups in the real world. We analyzed online conversations that occurred between members of protest groups from opposite sides of the political spectrum, obtained from Facebook event pages used to organize upcoming political protests and rallies in the United States and the United Kingdom and the occurrence of violence during these protests and rallies. Using natural language processing and text analysis, we show that increased engagement between groups online is associated with increased violence when these groups met in the real world. The level of engagement between groups taking place online is substantial, and can be characterized as negative, brief, and low in integrative complexity. These findings suggest that opposing groups may use unstructured online environments to engage with one another in hostile ways. This may reflect a worsening of relationships, in turn explaining the observed increases in physical violence offline. These findings raise questions as to whether unstructured online communication is compatible with positive intergroup contact, and highlights the role that the Internet might play in wider issues of extremism and radicalization.
Journal Article
Prejudice, Contact, and Threat at the Diversity-Segregation Nexus
Extensive research explores how increasing ethnic out-group populations in society affects inter-group attitudes. Drawing on the threat and contact hypotheses, this study develops and tests a framework examining the role of segregation in the out-group size/prejudice relationship. We suggest that whether increasing minority share in a community generates processes of contact and/or perceived threat will depend on how segregated groups are from one another. This, in turn, will determine when high minority share communities have positive, negative, or null effects on inter-group attitudes. Using data from white British individuals in England, we observe that community segregation moderates the effect of community percent non-white British on prejudice, as well as mechanisms of positive inter-group contact and perceived threat. Residents of more homogeneous communities report relatively warm inter-group attitudes, regardless of how segregated they are. Residents living among high proportions of out-group where the groups are integrated report an improvement in out-group attitudes. It is only residents living among large out-group populations where groups are more segregated from one another—at the nexus of high minority share and high segregation—who report colder out-group attitudes. This higher prejudice is driven by both lower positive contact and higher perceived threat in these communities. Using two waves of cohort panel data, longitudinal analysis provides more robust evidence in support of the diversity-segregation nexus framework: communities becoming more ethnically mixed and segregated see prejudice increase, while those becoming more mixed and integrated see stable, or somewhat improving, relations. Collectively, this paper shows that mechanisms of positive contact and threat appear conditional on both the size of out-groups in an area and how segregated groups are from one another, generating key differences in when and how increasing ethnic out-group size affects inter-group relations.
Journal Article
Contextual effect of positive intergroup contact on outgroup prejudice
We assessed evidence for a contextual effect of positive intergroup contact, whereby the effect of intergroup contact between social contexts (the between-level effect) on outgroup prejudice is greater than the effect of individual-level contact within contexts (the within-level effect). Across seven large-scale surveys (five cross-sectional and two longitudinal), using multilevel analyses, we found a reliable contextual effect. This effect was found in multiple countries, operationalizing context at multiple levels (regions, districts, and neighborhoods), and with and without controlling for a range of demographic and context variables. In four studies (three cross-sectional and one longitudinal) we showed that the association between context-level contact and prejudice was largely mediated by more tolerant norms. In social contexts where positive contact with outgroups was more commonplace, norms supported such positive interactions between members of different groups. Thus, positive contact reduces prejudice on a macrolevel, whereby people are influenced by the behavior of others in their social context, not merely on a microscale, via individuals' direct experience of positive contact with outgroup members. These findings reinforce the view that contact has a significant role to play in prejudice reduction, and has great policy potential as a means to improve intergroup relations, because it can simultaneously impact large numbers of people.
Journal Article
Intergroup Bias
▪ Abstract This chapter reviews the extensive literature on bias in favor of in-groups at the expense of out-groups. We focus on five issues and identify areas for future research: (a) measurement and conceptual issues (especially in-group favoritism vs. out-group derogation, and explicit vs. implicit measures of bias); (b) modern theories of bias highlighting motivational explanations (social identity, optimal distinctiveness, uncertainty reduction, social dominance, terror management); (c) key moderators of bias, especially those that exacerbate bias (identification, group size, status and power, threat, positive-negative asymmetry, personality and individual differences); (d) reduction of bias (individual vs. intergroup approaches, especially models of social categorization); and (e) the link between intergroup bias and more corrosive forms of social hostility.
Journal Article
