Psychological Essentialism of Human Categories

ABSTRACT— 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.     

The benefits of collective responsibility: How ingroup reputation concern motivates prosociality in intergroup contexts

Collective responsibility processes have been investigated from the perspectives of the outgroup (e.g., collective blame) and the ingroup (e.g., collective guilt). This article extends theory and research on collective responsibility with a third perspective, namely that of the individual actor whose behavior triggers the attribution of collective blame. Four experiments (n = 78, 118, 208 and 77, respectively) tested the hypotheses that collective responsibility processes influence the individual actors' appraisals, emotions and behavior. The possibility of collective blame for their individual action prompted more prosocial behavior among participants (Experiment 1). Participants also experienced more ingroup reputation concern and in turn more negative emotions (Experiment 2–4) for a past wrongdoing if it could reflect negatively on the ingroup in the eyes of outgroups. The increased negative emotions then motivated participants to improve the ingroup's image (Experiment 4). The effects were moderated by perceived ingroup entitativity, in that activating collective blame increased ingroup reputation concern and negative emotions only for ingroups perceived as highly entitative (Experiment 3).     

The Perception of the Other in International Relations: Evidence for the Polarizing Effect of Entitativity

In an international relations context, the mutual images held by actors affect their mutual expectations about the Other's behavior and guide the interpretation of the Other's actions. Here it is argued that the effect of these images is moderated by the degree of entitativity of the Other—that is, the extent to which it is perceived as a real entity. Two studies tested this hypothesis by manipulating the entitativity of the European Union (EU) among U.S. citizens whose images of the EU varied along the enemy/ally dimension. Results of these studies yielded converging evidence in support of the hypothesized moderating effect of entitativity. Specifically, entitativity showed a polarizing effect on the relationship between the image of the EU and judgments of harmfulness of actions carried out by the EU.     

“Patriotism à la Carte”: Perceived Legitimacy of Collective Guilt and Collective Pride as Motivators for Political Behavior

Intergroup emotions motivate behavior, yet little is known about how people perceive these emotional experiences in others. In three experiments (Ns = 109, 179, 246), we show that U.S. citizens believe collective guilt is an illegitimate emotional motivator for ingroup political behavior, while collective pride is legitimate. This differential legitimacy is due to the perception that collective guilt violates the norm of group interest, while collective pride adheres to it; those who believe ingroup interests are more important than outgroups’ exhibited this illegitimacy gap. The perception that the intergroup emotion promoted ingroup entitativity mediated the relationship between emotion (pride vs. guilt) and legitimacy; this relationship was especially strong for those high in the belief in the norm of group interest. Collective guilt can have prosocial consequences, yet the perception that it is illegitimate may hinder such consequences from being realized.     

Entitativity and social identity complexity: The relationship between group characteristics and personal characteristics on group identification

The current study extends previous works on group identification by focusing on how social identity complexity and entitativity interact to impact group identification. The purpose of the current study is to test the hypothesis that people with a simple social identity identify more strongly with a highly entitative group and people with complex social identity identify more strongly with a group low in entitativity. Participants’ social identity complexity and entitativity about a group were manipulated, and with that group was measured. Results demonstrated that participants primed with a simple social identity identified more strongly with a more highly entitative group, whereas identification with the high and low entitativity groups did not differ for participants primed with a complex social identity.     

Personifying the State: Consequences for Attitude Formation

Because states are abstract entities, they often require embodiment for mass publics and elites to understand them. This embodiment often occurs as personification, where the state is associated with the most salient figure in the political system, but embodiment can also occur through political institutions and social groups. Surprisingly, there is virtually no systematic empirical work on the political and psychological consequences of state personification, or other forms of embodiment. In this experiment, we investigate how various ways of embodying the state influence attitude formation processes. Drawing on the on-line/memory-based processing and entitativity literatures, we hypothesize that personification of the state should facilitate on-line processing and stronger attitudes, whereas embodying the state as a parliamentary institution should produce weaker attitudes that are formed in a memory-based fashion. The results support these hypotheses. Embodiment as a social group produced inconsistent results. This study provides the first systematic evidence that the widespread practice of personification of the state has robust and potentially far-reaching attitudinal consequences that have meaningful implications for strategic interaction, perception and learning, and attitude change in the international realm.     

Perceived collective continuity and attitudes toward outgroups

In a series of six studies, we examined the role that perceived collective continuity (PCC) plays in intergroup attitudes. While the extant literature focuses on attitudes toward ingroups, the current studies chose to expand upon this research by concentrating on three types of outgroups (national, religious, and organizational). Results indicated that for groups perceived as neutral or positive, increased PCC was associated with more positive attitudes, while for enemy groups, increased PCC was associated with more negative attitudes. Entitativity played a mediating role such that as the outgroup was perceived as more continuous, it was also seen as more entitative. Higher entitativity led to less negative attitudes toward a past ally but more negative attitudes toward a past enemy. Results held whether past conflict and PCC were measured or manipulated, further supporting our findings. PCC has negative or positive implications for judgments of outgroups depending on intergroup history. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

群组成员行动目标的一致性对群体实体性的影响:动作形式一致性的调节作用

群体被视为一个有机整体的特性被称为群体实体性。研究从行为的行动目标和动作形式两个特征维度出发,探讨了行动目标一致性和动作形式一致性如何共同作用于群体实体性。结果发现,在不同群体规模下,群体成员具有一致目标的群体实体性均高于不一致条件,但只有当行为发生在群体情景且符合合理性原则时,动作形式一致性对该影响关系才起到调节作用。该结果表明,只有当行为发生在群体情景且符合合理性原则时,行动目标和动作形式才联合作用于群体实体性。