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"Prentice, Deborah A"
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Psychological Essentialism of Human Categories
Psychological essentialism is an ordinary mode of category representation that has powerful social-psychological consequences. This article reviews those consequences, with a focus on the distinctive ways people perceive, evaluate, and interact with members of human categories they essentialize. Why and when people engage in this mode of thinking remain open questions. Variability in essentialism across cultures, categories, and contexts suggests that this mode of representing human categories is rooted in a naturalistic theory of category origins, combined with a need to explain differences that cross category boundaries.
Journal Article
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.
Journal Article
The effect of a savings intervention on women’s intimate partner violence victimization: heterogeneous findings from a randomized controlled trial in Colombia
Background
Women’s economic empowerment has long been assumed to lead to their social empowerment, but systematic tests of this relationship have only recently begun to appear in the literature. Theory predicts that control over resources, as through a savings account, may increase women’s negotiating power and self-efficacy. In this way, “economic empowerment” may lead to “social empowerment,” and have related benefits such as helping to reduce risk of intimate partner violence (IPV). The current study tests effects of an economic empowerment intervention on women’s social empowerment, IPV victimization, and health.
Methods
We conducted an 18-month randomized controlled trial among 1800 urban poor women in Colombia between 2013 and 2015. The trial tested the impact of a savings account offer bundled with health services (vs. health services alone) on social empowerment outcomes, IPV victimization, and health.
Results
The bundled savings treatment did not have average effects on most outcomes, although it produced a small significant increase in financial participation and decrease in symptoms of depression. Treatment effects on perceived norms, decision-making patterns, self-reported IPV victimization, and health depended on whether women’s partnerships were free of violence when they entered the trial; specifically, women in nonviolent partnerships at baseline showed more positive effects of the intervention.
Conclusions
Although bundling economic empowerment interventions with support features has been shown to empower poor women, this trial found that a bundled treatment did not on average improve most social and health outcomes of poor women experiencing IPV.
Trial registration
Registered retrospectively, prior to realization of outcomes, 5/29/14: Evidence in Governance and Politics
#20140529AA
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Journal Article
The Neural Substrates of Social Influence on Decision Making
The mechanisms that govern human learning and decision making under uncertainty have been the focus of intense behavioral and, more recently, neuroscientific investigation. Substantial progress has been made in building models of the processes involved, and identifying underlying neural mechanisms using simple, two-alternative forced choice decision tasks. However, less attention has been given to how social information influences these processes, and the neural systems that mediate this influence. Here we sought to address these questions by using tasks similar to ones that have been used to study individual decision making behavior, and adding conditions in which participants were given trial-by-trial information about the performance of other individuals (their choices and/or their rewards) simultaneously playing the same tasks. We asked two questions: How does such information about the behavior of others influence performance in otherwise simple decision tasks, and what neural systems mediate this influence? We found that bilateral insula exhibited a parametric relationship to the degree of misalignment of the individual's performance with those of others in the group. Furthermore, activity in the bilateral insula significantly predicted participants' subsequent choices to align their behavior with others in the group when they were misaligned either in their choices (independent of success) or their degree of success (independent of specific choices). These findings add to the growing body of empirical data suggesting that the insula participates in an important way in social information processing and decision making.
Journal Article
Intervening to Change Social Norms: When Does It Work?
[...]the proliferation of channels of communication—spoken statements, written statements, messages, blogs, surveys, traditional media, social media—means that people have access to more information about each other than ever before. In particular, they show a robust tendency to assume that other people are like them, a bias known as the false consensus effect (Marks and Miller 1987). Because false consensus operates at the individual level, biasing each person’s construction of social norms in his or her own direction, it does not introduce a systematic bias that could serve as the target for an intervention. [...]an analysis of the determinants of the strength of the norm may facilitate the development of an intervention with maximal impact on behavior. [...]in interventions that use opinion leaders, a subset of group members—those who are most influential within their community—is trained to exhibit new behaviors and to encourage the adoption of those behaviors by their peers.
Journal Article
Liberal Norms and Their Discontents
Recent analyses of the predominance of liberals in personality and social psychology have raised the possibility that this ideological imbalance is driven in part by active discrimination against conservatives. In this article, I review empirical evidence relevant to this possibility and find little support for it. The evidence points instead to a predominance of liberal views in academia more generally, driven by multiple factors including the consonance of academic work with the goals and values of liberals. Within the field of personality and social psychology, this concentration of liberal views has fostered strong liberal norms, which both intensify and exaggerate the field's ideological homogeneity. These liberal norms have unfortunate narrowing effects on research in personality and social psychology; remedies for these effects should focus on weakening the norms.
Journal Article
The integration of social influence and reward: Computational approaches and neural evidence
Decades of research have established that decision-making is dramatically impacted by both the rewards an individual receives and the behavior of others. How do these distinct influences exert their influence on an individual’s actions, and can the resulting behavior be effectively captured in a computational model? To address this question, we employed a novel spatial foraging game in which groups of three participants sought to find the most rewarding location in an unfamiliar two-dimensional space. As the game transitioned from one block to the next, the availability of information regarding other group members was varied systematically, revealing the relative impacts of feedback from the environment and information from other group members on individual decision-making. Both reward-based and socially-based sources of information exerted a significant influence on behavior, and a computational model incorporating these effects was able to recapitulate several key trends in the behavioral data. In addition, our findings suggest how these sources were processed and combined during decision-making. Analysis of reaction time, location of gaze, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data indicated that these distinct sources of information were integrated simultaneously for each decision, rather than exerting their influence in a separate, all-or-none fashion across separate subsets of trials. These findings add to our understanding of how the separate influences of reward from the environment and information derived from other social agents are combined to produce decisions.
Journal Article
Inequality is a relationship
A view of inequality as a relationship between the advantaged and the disadvantaged has gained considerable currency in psychological research. However, the implications of this view for theories and interventions designed to reduce inequality remain largely unexplored. Drawing on the literature on close relationships, we identify several key features that a relational theory of social change should include.
Journal Article