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How does cultural diversity influence the performance of semi-virtual teams? We use the prism of esports and insights from virtual identity research and social categorization theory to determine the effect on semi-virtual teams in which member interaction is not necessarily mediated or constrained by physical world sociocultural norms. The common ground that has developed in esports results in a superordinate, culture-free gamer identity that transcends the virtual and physical worlds, and thus multicultural teams can enjoy the benefits of diverse knowledge without suffering unduly from social disintegration when gamer identity is salient – a reality challenged less in the virtual world than in the physical one. We conduct an empirical study using data from 4035 League of Legends games played by 102 multicultural teams from 2017 to 2020. Our results show that cultural diversity improves the quality of team strategy when gamer identity becomes more salient, and that that may come about when players are intensely exposed to the game world, when they play with many different virtual characters, and when they play at home court.

This study examines the role of culture in the interplay between female participation in entrepreneurial teams, team processes, and outcomes using stereotype activation, social categorization, and identity theories. Our analysis of 64 entrepreneurial teams including members from 20 countries reveals that team reflexivity mediates the relationship between the proportion of women in a team and a team’s access to resources. This effect is further enhanced when team members are from countries with a more favorable national perception of women’s entrepreneurship. Our findings further demonstrate how the proportion of women in a team and cultural perceptions towards women’s entrepreneurship can impact the quality of team processes and, consequently, a team’s access to resources. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results on women entrepreneurship, new venture teams, and culture research.

Every time a major violent act takes place in the United States, a public debate erupts as to whether it should be considered terrorism. Political scientists have offered a variety of conceptual frameworks, but have neglected to explore how ordinary citizens understand terrorism, despite the central role the public plays in our understanding of the relationship between terrorism and government action in the wake of violence. We synthesize components of both scholarly definitions and public debates to formulate predictions for how various attributes of incidents affect the likelihood they are perceived as terrorism. Combining a conjoint experiment with machine learning techniques and automated content analysis of media coverage, we show the importance not only of the type and severity of violence, but also the attributed motivation for the incident and social categorization of the actor. The findings demonstrate how the language used to describe violent incidents, for which the media has considerable latitude, affects the likelihood the public classifies incidents as terrorism.

Language use plays a crucial role in the consensualization of stereotypes within cultural groups. Based on an integrative review of the literature on stereotyping and biased language use, we propose the Social Categories and Stereotypes Communication (SCSC) framework. The framework integrates largely independent areas of literature and explicates the linguistic processes through which social-category stereotypes are shared and maintained. We distinguish two groups of biases in language use that jointly feed and maintain three fundamental cognitive variables in (shared) social-category cognition: perceived category entitativity, stereotype content, and perceived essentialism of associated stereotypic characteristics. These are: (1) Biases in linguistic labels used to denote categories, within which we discuss biases in (a) label content and (b) linguistic form of labels; (2) Biases in describing behaviors and characteristics of categorized individuals, within which we discuss biases in (a) communication content (i.e., what information is communicated), and (b) linguistic form of descriptions (i.e., how is information formulated). Together, these biases create a self-perpetuating cycle in which social-category stereotypes are shared and maintained. The framework allows for a better understanding of stereotype maintaining biases in natural language. We discuss various opportunities for further research.

Societal change and personal life events sometimes make one feel uncertain about one's self and identity. According to uncertainty-identity theory, this self-uncertainty can motivate people to identify with social groups, particularly groups that provide a distinctive and clearly defined identity and associated normative beliefs and behavioral prescriptions. This process can make more extreme groups and behaviors attractive as a source of identification-contingent uncertainty reduction. People may zealously identify with highly distinctive groups that have strong and directive leadership and ideological and ethnocentric belief systems that proscribe dissent and prescribe group-normative behavior. This analysis has been extended to help illuminate how extremism may emerge in the context of religion, politics, gangs, leadership, and adolescent risk taking. This article describes uncertainty-identity theory, overviews empirical support for its main tenets, and outlines some directions for future research.

Whereas much social psychological research has studied the in-group and out-group implications of social categorization and collective identity (“we”), little research has examined the nature and relevance of collective psychological ownership (“ours”) for intergroup relations. We make a case for considering collective psychological ownership as an important source of intergroup tensions. We do so by integrating theory and research from various social sciences, and we draw out implications for future social psychological research on intergroup relations. We discuss collective psychological ownership in relation to the psychology of possessions, marking behavior, intergroup threats, outgroup exclusion, and in-group responsibility. We suggest that the social psychological processes discussed apply to a range of ownership objects (territory, buildings, cultural artifacts) and various intergroup settings, including international, national, and local contexts, and in organizations and communities. We conclude by providing directions for future research in different intergroup contexts.

Research summary: We study the association between firms' entrepreneurial outcomes and their gender composition. Though highly topical, there is little solid empirical knowledge of this issue, which calls for an inductive approach. We match a paired-respondent questionnaire survey with population-wide employer-employee data, and find evidence that the presence of female top managers is positively related to entrepreneurial outcomes in established firms. Yet, this relation is conditional on the proportion between male and female top managers. Another finding is that the overall proportion of women in the firm's workforce negatively moderates the relation between female top managers and entrepreneurial outcomes. We discuss various mechanisms that can explain these findings, and argue that they are best understood in terms of the dynamics of social categorization. Managerial summary: We investigate how companies benefit from having more women on the top-management team. We show that beyond a threshold level of female top managers, more women are associated with more entrepreneurial outcomes (more products and services profitably launched). However, this positive effect is weakened in firms that have many women in the workforce. These effects may be explained in terms of the ways employees mentally categorize managers and how this influences their work motivation. We find evidence for such an explanation.

Social essentialism entails the belief that certain social categories (e.g., gender, race) mark fundamentally distinct kinds of people. Essentialist beliefs have pernicious consequences, supporting social stereotyping and contributing to prejudice. How does social essentialism develop? In the studies reported here, we tested the hypothesis that generic language facilitates the cultural transmission of social essentialism. Two studies found that hearing generic language about a novel social category diverse for race, ethnicity, age, and sex led 4-y-olds and adults to develop essentialist beliefs about that social category. A third study documented that experimentally inducing parents to hold essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led them to produce more generic language when discussing the category with their children. Thus, generic language facilitates the transmission of essentialist beliefs about social categories from parents to children.

Classifying people into categories not only helps humans simplify a complex social world but also contributes to stereotyping and discrimination. This research examines how social categorization develops by testing how language imbues with meaning otherwise arbitrary differences between people. Experimental studies (N = 129) with 2-year-olds showed that generic language—language that refers to abstract kinds—guides the development of social categorization. Toddlers learned a new category after hearing generic language about individuals who shared an arbitrary perceptual feature but not after hearing matched specific language, simple labels, or plural (but nongeneric) language about the same set of individuals. These findings show how subtle linguistic cues shape the development of social categorization.

Social categorization is an early-developing feature of human social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of and predictions about human behavior has been unclear. In the studies reported here, we tested whether a foundational functional role of social categories is to mark people as intrinsically obligated to one another (e.g., obligated to protect rather than harm). In three studies, children (aged 3—9, N = 124) viewed only within-category harm as violating intrinsic obligations; in contrast, they viewed between-category harm as violating extrinsic obligations defined by explicit rules. These data indicate that children view social categories as marking patterns of intrinsic interpersonal obligations, suggesting that a key function of social categories is to support inferences about how people will relate to members of their own and other groups.