Perceived intragroup homogeneity in minority-majority contexts.

Examined how the factors relative in-group size and relative outgroup size (i.e., minority vs. nonminority) affect the perception of in-group and out-group homogeneity. On the basis of social identity theory, we hypothesized that (a) members of minorities would perceive the in-group as more homogeneous than the out-group, whereas members of nonminorities would perceive the reverse; (b) this effect would be strongest on dimensions most strongly correlated with the social categorization; and (c) members of minorities would identify more strongly with their in-group than would members of nonminorities. 192 13–15 yr olds participated in the experiment. On the presumed basis of a perceptual task, approximately half were randomly allocated to minimal social categories, which differed in perceived size relative to an out-group (which also differed in perceived size). They were asked to estimate the homogeneity of the two groups on a number of dimensional attributes. The remaining (control) subjects gave similar estimates under identical conditions, except that they were not allocated to a category. The data confirmed all but the second hypothesis, which was only partially supported. The results were interpreted in terms of social identification processed. Results tend to rule out alternative explanations in terms of an inverse relation between group size and perceived group homogeneity, rating extremity, and in-group favoritism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social values and social conflict in creative problem solving and categorization.

Participants were led to expect either cooperation or conflict, and then performed K. Duncker's (1945) functional-fixedness task (Experiment 1) or E. Rosch's (1975) categorization task (Experiment 2). Those who expected cooperation, compared with those who expected conflict, were more likely to solve Duncker's task and used categories more inclusively, that is, rated low-prototypic exemplars of a category as better members of the category. In Experiment 3, the direct experience of cooperation and conflict had the same effect on categorization. In Experiment 4, participants were classified as having cooperative, competitive, or individualistic social values, and were led to expect either cooperation, conflict, or neither in a control. In the control, cooperators used categories more inclusively than competitors or individualists. Competitors used categories least inclusively in the conflict condition; in the cooperation condition, they used categories most inclusively. These results are interpreted in terms of the possible mediating role of cognitive organization in individual and intergroup conflict resolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perception of variability in category development: Instance- versus abstraction-based stereotypes.

We conducted two experiments to investigate the acquisition and representation of social categories, with an emphasis on the perception of variability of group members. In Experiment 1, subjects learned about a group that was sociable and intelligent and either high or low in variability with respect to these attributes. Differences in the actual variability of group members were reflected in subjects' estimates of variability, in their tendency to generalize from the traits and goals of a single member to the entire group, and in their classification judgments of new instances, which reflected their expectations of group members' future behavior. Memory for instances of the category also played a role in these judgment tasks. In Experiment 2, subjects who first learned about the behaviors performed by group members and then about general characteristics of the group perceived the group as more variable than did those who learned the same information in the reverse order. In both experiments, we manipulated memory for specific behaviors such that either the most extreme behaviors or behaviors at the center of the distribution were most memorable. This manipulation did not affect estimates of perceived variability, suggesting that these were constructed and stored on-line rather than from a retrieved set of category exemplars. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exposure to dissent and recall of information.

Recent work on minority influence has led to a debate about whether majorities and minorities exercise different forms of influence. C. L. Nemeth (see record 1986-14271-001) has argued that consistent minorities induce different cognitive processes than do consistent majorities, with a resulting impact on the quality of the judgments rendered. Two experiments test this theory. In Experiment 1, Ss heard 3 tape-recorded lists of words and learned that either a minority or a majority differed in the category "first noticed." This feedback occurred either once or over 3 trials. When exposure was once, recall was not affected by the source; when it was consistent, Ss exposed to the minority view recalled more words than those exposed to the majority view. In Experiment 2, Ss were exposed to a minority view that was either consistent over time or inconsistent over time. Ss exposed to a consistent minority had better recall than control Ss. Exposure to an inconsistent minority did not improve recall. The results offer support for the Nemeth formulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is a rose always a rose? The role of social category exemplar change in attitude stability and attitude-behavior consistency.

Three experiments tested whether changes in social category exemplars affect attitude stability, attitude–behavior consistency, or attitude change. In Experiment 1, participants displayed greater attitude stability across 1 month, in several social categories, when they named the same rather than different exemplars. In Experiment 2, participants displayed greater attitude–behavior consistency toward each of 2 social categories when they named the same rather than different exemplars at behavior assessment and at attitude assessment. Participants who named a more likable exemplar behaved more positively, and those who named a less likable exemplar behaved more negatively, than their initial attitudes predicted. In Experiment 3, participants changed their attitudes in the predicted direction after estimating the height of an exemplar who was either more or less likable than the one they had earlier named. The results are interpreted as consistent with recent theory and research on attitude introspection, the matching hypothesis, and models of social judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

When self-categorization makes sense: the role of meaningful social categorization in minority and majority members' self-perception

The authors examined the joint influence of meaningful social categorization and relative in-group size on the depersonalization of self-perception. Meaningfulness of social categorization was varied following the fit principle, introduced by self-categorization theory. In Experiment 1, the authors predicted and found that minority members show more depersonalized self-perception than majority members if, and only if, the meaningfulness of the underlying in-group-out-group categorization is high as opposed to low. Experiment 2 further substantiated that a meaningful social categorization affects only minority members' self-perception. Finally, the conceptual relationship between fit, meaning, and identity is discussed.     

Social identity contingencies: How diversity cues signal threat or safety for African Americans in mainstream institutions.

This research demonstrates that people at risk of devaluation based on group membership are attuned to cues that signal social identity contingencies--judgments, stereotypes, opportunities, restrictions, and treatments that are tied to one's social identity in a given setting. In 3 experiments, African American professionals were attuned to minority representation and diversity philosophy cues when they were presented as a part of workplace settings. Low minority representation cues coupled with colorblindness (as opposed to valuing diversity) led African American professionals to perceive threatening identity contingencies and to distrust the setting (Experiment 1). The authors then verified that the mechanism mediating the effect of setting cues on trust was identity contingent evaluations (Experiments 2 & 3). The power of social identity contingencies as they relate to underrepresented groups in mainstream institutions is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Part-Set Cuing Effects in Younger and Older Adults.

In 3 experiments, the authors examined part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults. Participants heard lists of category exemplars and later recalled them. Recall was uncued or cued with a subset of studied items. In Experiment 1, participants were cued with some of the category names, and they remembered fewer never-cued categories than a free-recall condition. In Experiment 2, a similar effect was observed for category exemplar cues. There was also an age difference: By some measures, a small number of cues impaired older adults more than younger. Experiment 3 replicated this result and found that older adults were disproportionately slow in the presence of cues. Across experiments, older adults showed robust part-set cuing effects, and sometimes, they were disproportionately impaired by cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorization of speech by infants: Support for speech-sound prototypes.

This study tested 6-month-old infants' categorization of speech stimuli to investigate whether infants organize speech categories around "prototypes." In Experiment 1, infants first discriminated single "good" exemplars from two different vowel categories. They were then tested with 64 novel exemplars, 32 from each vowel category. The test stimuli varied in the degree to which they conformed to adult-defined prototypes of the two categories. The results showed that infants correctly sorted the novel stimuli over 90% of the time. In Experiment 2, we trained two groups of infants, one with a good (prototypical) exemplar from a vowel category and the other with a poor (nonprototypical) exemplar. Then we tested both groups with 16 novel exemplars from that same vowel category. Generalization to novel members of the category was significantly greater following exposure to the prototypical exemplar. Results are consistent with a model of speech perception that holds that young human infants organize vowel categories around prototypes. This may contribute to their seemingly efficient processing of speech information, even in the first half year of life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferring category attributes from exemplar attributes: Geometric shapes and social categories.

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that judgments about the attributes of categories are disproportionately based on the characteristics of exemplars that fit the category. In the first 2 experiments, subjects were presented with good and bad exemplars of categories with defining attributes (rectangles, triangles, pentagons, and ellipses) in which different colors were arbitrarily paired with the good and poor exemplars. In both experiments, subjects erroneously judged the colors paired with the good exemplars as more frequent than colors paired with the poor exemplars. A third experiment, using social categories, examined whether attributes associated with a single category member were more likely to generalize to the category as a whole for prototypical than for nonprototypical category members. Subjects were presented with information about individual fraternity members who varied in prototypicality, and the tendency to infer a target behavior (liberal vs. conservative voting behavior) from the individual fraternity member to the fraternity as a whole increased with the prototypicality of the category member. Implications for the contact hypothesis, category–exemplar relations, and belief stability are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferring category characteristics from sample characteristics: Inductive reasoning and social projection.

Inductive reasoning involves generalization from sample observations to categories. This research examined the conditions under which generalizations go beyond the boundaries of the sampled categories. In Experiment 1, participants sampled colored chips from urns. When categorization was not salient, participants revised their estimates of the probability of a particular color even in urns they had not sampled. As categorization became more salient, generalization became limited to the sampled urn. In Experiment 2 the salience of categorization in social induction was varied. When social categorization was not salient, participants projected their own responses to test items to members of a laboratory group even when they themselves did to belong to this group. When salience increased, projection decreased among nonmembers but not among members. In Experiment 3 these results were replicated in a field setting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Causal status and coherence in causal-based categorization.

Research has documented two effects of interfeature causal knowledge on classification. A causal status effect occurs when features that are causes are more important to category membership than their effects. A coherence effect occurs when combinations of features that are consistent with causal laws provide additional evidence of category membership. In this study, we found that stronger causal relations led to a weaker causal status effect and a stronger coherence effect (Experiment 1), that weaker alternative causes led to stronger causal status and coherence effects (Experiment 2), and that “essentialized” categories led to a stronger causal status effect (Experiment 3), albeit only for probabilistic causal links (Experiment 4). In addition, the causal status effect was mediated by features' subjective category validity, the probability they occur in category members. These findings were consistent with a generative model of categorization but inconsistent with an alternative model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some determinants of the persuasive power of in-groups and out-groups: Organization of information and attribution of independence.

Four experiments examined the hypothesis that in-groups exert more influence than do out-groups. The hypothesis was supported using both laboratory groups of university students and a natural social category (university affiliation). Ss exposed to in-group communicators attributed greater independence to them, made fewer errors in recalling their messages, and clustered recollections of messages by individual speaker. In addition, the persuasiveness of out-group members was enhanced when individuating information was provided about them that increased their heterogeneity. The individuated out-group members were as influential as in-group communicators. Results were interpreted in terms of attribution and social identity processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sexual Harassment Under Social Identity Threat: The Computer Harassment Paradigm.

Two laboratory experiments investigated the hypothesis that threat to male identity would increase the likelihood of gender harassment. In both experiments, using the computer harassment paradigm, male university students (N=80 in Experiment 1, N=90 in Experiment 2) were exposed to different types of identity threat (legitimacy threat and threat to group value in Experiment 1 and distinctiveness threat and prototypicality threat in Experiment 2) or to no threat and were then given the opportunity to send pornographic material to a virtual female interaction partner. Results show that (a) participants harassed the female interaction partner more when they were exposed to a legitimacy, distinctiveness, or prototypicality threat than to no threat; (b) this was mainly true for highly identified males; and (c) harassment enhanced postexperimental gender identification. Results are interpreted as supporting a social identity account of gender harassment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does PAULA prime PAUL? Does WAITER prime WAITRESS? Implicit transfer across gender forms of verbal stimuli

Repetition-priming effects were investigated with a speeded verification task as an indirect or implicit test. Subjects were asked to verify whether items were instances of the categories "first name" and "profession." In Experiment 1, instances were repeated in their alternate gender form (e.g., PAUL as PAULA, or WAITRESS as WAITER) and performance was compared to new instances. Facilitation in terms of faster response latencies for old instances (i.e., repetitions in the alternative gender form) was restricted to the category "profession." In Experiment 2, facilitation was found for names studied and tested in the same gender form (e.g., PAUL-PAUL). Instances of professions were repeated in either the same or the alternative gender form; the amount of facilitation was identical for the two repetition conditions. However, transfer across gender forms was affected by the study-test order (facilitation was larger from male to female than from female to male) and by the gender dominance of specific instances. In Experiment 3, the interfering effect of gender dominance was not replicated. Response accuracy tended to parallel the latency results in all experiments, but without reaching statistical reliability. Therefore, the faster response latencies for old items are by no means the result of a speed-accuracy trade-off. The central finding of the experiments reported is the material-dependent dissociation of repetition transfer across gender forms that occurred for instances of professions, but was absent for names. This dissociation is interpreted to indicate that the stimulus-driven speeded verification test is sensitive to conceptual, but not to perceptual, processing aspects of a study event.     

Category learning and change: Differences in sensitivity to information that enhances or reduces intercategory distinctions.

We examined the amenability of abstractions of categories to new and relevant information. In Experiment 1, Ss formed impressions of 2 sets of numbers by periodically estimating the cumulative means of each set. During the 1st half of the procedure, the 2 means were mathematically stable. During the 2nd half of the procedure, the mean of 1 set was modified and the mean of the other set remained unchanged. We predicted and found that the resultant estimates for the modified category changed more when the mean difference between the 2 categories was enhanced than when it was reduced. Experiment 2 suggested that the accentuation effect results from a 2-stage process of category learning (Stage 1) and category change (Stage 2). Experiment 3 replicated the effect with person categories. The relevance of category accentuation is discussed with respect to the modifiability of social beliefs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Event-related potentials indicate different processes to mediate categorical and associative priming in person recognition.

Whether representations of people are stored in associative networks based on co-occurrence or are stored in terms of more abstract semantic categories is a controversial question. In the present study, participants performed fame decisions to unfamiliar or famous target faces (Experiment 1) or names (Experiment 2), which were primed, either by highly associated celebrity names or by names from the same occupational category, or were unprimed. Reaction times and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Reaction times yielded significant priming effects for both associated and same category conditions. ERPs to targets in the associated condition were significantly more positive than were ERPs in all other conditions over central and parietal areas (300-600 ms; N400 priming effect). By contrast, a more posterior effect was found for categorical priming. These findings held for both cross-domain (Experiment 1) and within-domain conditions (Experiment 2). Results (a) demonstrate behavioral and ERP evidence for categorical priming in person recognition, consistent with the assumption that shared semantic information units can mediate semantic priming, and (b) suggest that associative and categorical priming are based on mechanisms that are at least partially different. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early and late selection in unconscious information processing.

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit congruency effect. In Experiment 2, 40 targets all depicting animals were presented. Results were in line with late selections assumptions because novel animal primes but not novel primes from different semantic categories yielded congruency effects. In Experiment 3, the targets were chosen such that there is a second semantic feature that covaried with the required response. Here, novel primes picturing small animals did not influence target responses with regard to the instructed size classification, but with regard to their affiliation to the category animal. In Experiment 4, small and large pictures from two categories were presented. Category match did not influence priming, ruling out that feature overlap contaminated the former results. The results indicate that participants’ prestimulus expectations determine in which stage in the processing-stream masked stimuli are selected. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)