ArticlePDF Available

Diversity in the Person, Diversity in the Group: Challenges of Identity Complexity for Social Perception and Social Interaction

European Journal of Social Psychology

June 2009
40(1):1 - 16

DOI:10.1002/ejsp.647

Authors:

Galen V Bodenhausen

Northwestern University

Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual, both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable targets, as well as from the perspective of actors using their different self-aspects as a framework for guiding their interactions with the social world. I review several contributions to the effort to better understand these issues and then explore some of their possible implications for understanding the nature and consequences of diversity within the group. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Content uploaded by Galen V Bodenhausen

Content may be subject to copyright.

Content uploaded by Galen V Bodenhausen

Content may be subject to copyright.

Agenda

Diversity in the person, diversity in the group: Challenges of identity

complexity for social perception and social interaction

GALEN V. BODENHAUSEN*

Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, USA

Abstract

Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual,

both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable

targets, as well as from the perspective of actors using their different self-aspects as a framework for guiding their

interactions with the social world. I review several contributions to the effort to better understand these issues and then

explore some of their possible implications for understanding the nature and consequences of diversity within the group.

The importance of social categories in guiding social cognition and behavior was recognized decades ago by

seminal ﬁgures in social psychology (Allport, 1954; Sherif, 1948; Tajfel, 1974). Since then, research on social

categorization and associated phenomena such as stereotyping and intergroup conﬂict has ﬂowed in a steadily

increasing stream, attesting to the theoretical centrality and practical signiﬁcance of these issues. Much of the

social psychological research that has been conducted in this tradition has focused on one identity dimension at a

time (e.g., race or sex or nationality) and has assumed the existence of distinct, discrete categories within a given

dimension (e.g., clearly deﬁned racial groups) rather than overlapping, blended, or ambiguous categories. In addition,

researchers often tend either to adopt the perspective of the observer, asking how social categories are imposed on

target persons in the course of social perception, or they adopt the perspective of the actor, asking how categorical

identities are claimed or disavowed in the course of self-perception, and how these identities inﬂuence subsequent self-

regulation. These research traditions have yielded undeniably rich and diverse insights into the dynamics of social

categorization, but the picture they have produced has not fully come to terms with some of the inherent complexities of

social categorization.

In recent times, researchers have begun to turn their attention more explicitly toward the multifaceted nature of social

identities. The diversity of identity, within the individual, has been increasingly recognized and investigated, both from the

perceiver’s and the actor’s perspectives. The impact of a group’s diversity on group dynamics and productivity has also

been increasingly recognized in recent years, but the issue becomes more complicated when one recognizes the diversity

that resides within the individual members comprising the group. In this article, I review some of the recent research and

theory bearing on the diversity of identity, considering its implications both for individuals and groups. As will become

clear, many key issues remain ripe for empirical exploration.

European Journal of Social Psychology

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 1–16 (2010)

Published online 3 June 2009 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.647

*Correspondence to: Galen V. Bodenhausen, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2710, USA.

E-mail: galen@northwestern.edu

Received 1 April 2009

Accepted 9 April 2009

DIVERSITY IN THE PERSON

For fairly obvious reasons, researchers interested in racism often conduct experiments in which a target’s apparent race

(and/or the perceiver’s race) varies, while other aspects of the person are ignored or held constant. By focusing on this

single identity dimension, the overarching role of race can be discerned and evaluated. Similar approaches have been taken

in research on sexism, ageism, and other forms of identity-based prejudice, with many valuable insights accruing.

However, these approaches ignore the inherently multifaceted nature of social identity. By arranging experimental

manipulations so that only one speciﬁc social category is salient, researchers bypass fundamental questions about how the

multiplicity of social identity might be spontaneously navigated in the absence of direct experimental cueing. Fortunately,

other research approaches have more to say about this issue, and a picture is emerging of the factors that determine when

and how particular identities become focal and how they function in relation to one another.

The Complexity of Identity

The idea that an actor’s identity is not stable but rather shifts across time was a central feature of the dramaturgical

perspective advanced by the advocates of symbolic interactionism (Burke, 1945; Goffman, 1959). One particular variant

of this approach, role theory (e.g., Stryker, 1968; Stryker & Serpe, 1982), proposed that each social identity an individual

possesses exists in a hierarchy of salience; the actual momentary salience of any given social role is assumed to dictate its

power to guide and constrain behavior, and as salience shifts, behavior shifts in a corresponding manner. From this

perspective, the diversity of the person resides in the repertoire of social roles and identities occupied by the individual.

In more recent decades, the dynamics through which different social categories become self-deﬁning have been

conceptualized most inﬂuentially by self-categorization theorists (SCT; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987;

Turner, Oakes, Haslam, & McGarty, 1994). Although framed in terms of how the categorization of the self changes across

situations, the theory assumes corresponding patterns in the categorization of others. Its key insight is that social identities

come spontaneously into focus in a given situation to the degree that they provide a contextually meaningful framework

for deﬁning it as an intergroup situation. The contextual meaningfulness of social categories is postulated to depend on the

degree to which they provide comparative ﬁt (by accounting for patterns of similarity and difference across individuals;

e.g., Wegener & Klauer, 2004) and normative ﬁt (by aligning observed behavior with the norms associated with particular

groups; Oakes, 1987). Other variables that can contextually inﬂuence patterns of categorization include the relative

distinctiveness of a given identity (e.g., Nelson & Miller, 1995) and the extent towhich activating a categorical identity can

satisfy momentarily inﬂuential personal goals and motives (e.g., Mussweiler, Gabriel, & Bodenhausen, 2000). All of these

perspectives emphasize dynamic and ﬂexible shifts in the salience of social categories across time, with their inﬂuence on

behavior waxing and waning correspondingly.

A given individual’s identity can shift across distinct dimensions (e.g., sex versus ethnicity versus nationality, etc.) as

well as along a more ‘‘vertical’’ dimension, as emphasized in SCT (i.e., personal level, subgroup level, ‘‘basic’’ group

level, superordinate group level). Consider Barack Obama. He can potentially be categorized as male, a US citizen, a

politician, Christian, etc. Within any of these categories, relatively more inclusive or exclusive bases for categorization

exist (e.g., for the geopolitical identity ‘‘US citizen,’’ we could think of ‘‘Chicagoans’’ as a more exclusive subtype for him

and ‘‘North Americans’’ as a more inclusive one). In theory, all of these different ways of categorizing Obama could be

relatively independent of one another, but in practice they clearly are not. For one thing, any of the seemingly distinct,

independent bases for categorization can serve to deﬁne a more exclusive subtype of another category (e.g., ‘‘Black

Americans’’ or‘‘American Men’’). Penner and Saperstein (2008)reported evidence showing that perceived race— a category

often thought of in biologically essentialist terms (Hirschfeld, 1996)—is determined to a noteworthy degree by a person’s

social status. That is, the racial categories ascribed to others, and the racial categories that are self-ascribed, can change as a

function of changes in an individual’s social status, as marked by membership in categories like ‘‘prisoners’’ and ‘‘the

unemployed.’’ Thus, conceptually orthogonal identity dimensions can interact to determine social categorization. Much

more research needs to address the general psychological principles governing such interactions, although as reviewed below,

many interesting clues are already available. The diversity of the person is greatly expanded beyond his or her basic repertoire

of identities by the many potential interactions among these roles. It is evident not only in shiftsin categorization across time

but also in contemporaneous inﬂuences and intersections of identities that can modify their basic characteristics.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

2Galen V. Bodenhausen

This idea carries important implications for how social categories are used. Stereotyping and prejudice, too, must be

characterized by a degree of ﬂexibility and context sensitivity, if the categorical representations giving rise to them are so

dynamic and interactive. This idea has been supported by a number of recent studies. Wittenbrink, Judd, and Park (2001)

showed that automatic evaluations of racial minority targets (speciﬁcally, African Americans) were moderated by the

context in which these targets were presented (a church versus an urban street corner; see also Barden, Maddux, Petty, &

Brewer, 2004). With respect to stereotyping, Garcia-Marques, Santos, and Mackie (2006) showed that the stereotypes

applied to a given target tend to shift across contexts, because contextually salient information gets incorporated into

active stereotype representations. Along similar lines, Mendoza-Denton, Park, and O’Connor (2008) showed that gender-

based stereotyping changes across different contexts. For example, they found that expectations about the differential

assertiveness of men versus women are moderated by the situation in which a target is depicted (e.g., at home versus in the

workplace). There could be a number of reasons why stereotypes shift when category members are encountered in

different contexts. For one, speciﬁc contexts can activate speciﬁc categorical subtypes, in effect ﬁne-tuning categorization

and stereotyping. Research conﬁrms that subtypes can trigger quite distinct stereotypic associations, compared to the

‘‘parent’’ category (e.g., Devine & Baker, 1991). Another possibility is that context cues can inﬂuence the perceived

prototypicality of a target vis-a

`-vis the category. Prototypicality, in turn, is a noteworthy moderator of stereotyping (e.g.,

Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006; Maddox, 2004). Because salient (but conceptually orthogonal)

identity dimensions can function as an important kind of context cue, they can modify the expression of stereotyping via

mechanisms such as these.

One of the most systematic approaches to understanding the nature of the simultaneous inﬂuences of distinct identity

dimensions has been the research on crossed categorization (for a recent review, see Crisp & Hewstone, 2007). The

majority of this research has examined how the extent to which multiple identities are shared between a perceiver and a

target moderates the perceiver’s evaluative reactions to the target. Theorists working in this area have developed many

interesting hypotheses about possible patterns of interactions within the contingency table deﬁned by two cross-cutting

identity dimensions. However, the most common result is an additive pattern, in which the positivity of evaluations is a

straightforward linear function of number of shared identity dimensions, irrespective of which particular dimension(s) are

shared and which are not. This research has offered some important insights, taking us beyond the one-category-at-a-time

approaches that have typiﬁed much of the research on social categorization, but it does have some limitations. For one,

with a few exceptions (to be noted), the focus of this work has generally been on the global evaluative consequences of

cross-cutting categories, leaving issues of descriptive stereotyping unaddressed. For another, many cross-categorization

studies involve methods that explicitly direct the perceiver’s attention to both identity dimensions, leaving open questions

about when and whether perceivers are likely to spontaneously notice and make use of more than one category at a time.

Another interesting question about the interplay of different categories concerns the possible interactions among

hierarchically nested identities. When subgroup identities form, it seems likely that their cognitive representation will

emphasize features that set them apart from the more inclusive groups of which they are a subset; otherwise, there would

be little need for a distinct subtype. At the same time, research on the ingroup projection model (Wenzel, Mummendey, &

Waldzus, 2007) has shown that membership in a particular lower-level identity can modify the way a more inclusive

category is construed. Speciﬁcally, one’s own subgroup identity is likely to be especially inﬂuential in deﬁning the

prototypic characteristics of the superordinate group. Thus, for example, French people and German people may have

different understandings of the typical features that deﬁne the superordinate category ‘‘Europeans.’’ If the superordinate

category has different, subgroup-centric meanings for the different subgroups, then the ostensibly shared superordinate

identity may be perceived as being less fully shared than set-theory logic might imply. Moreover, although a shared,

superordinate identity is expected to produce beneﬁcial effects on intergroup attitudes (e.g., Dovidio, Gaertner, & Saguy,

2009), attainment of these beneﬁts can be compromised when members of a subgroup do not feel recognized and respected

within the more inclusive category, and thus do not identify particularly strongly with it (Hornsey & Hogg, 2000). There

are many ways in which different levels of identiﬁcation within a nested hierarchy can interact with one another.

Yet another context for thinking about category interactions concerns different identities within the same identity

dimension. We typically think of the distinct identities within a given dimension as being mutually exclusive—we are

either men or women, members of one racial group or another, citizens of one country or another, adherents of one religion

or another, etc. In reality, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Even categorization by sex is not as cleanly

dimorphic as most people assume, as the rare but regularly occurring case of intersex persons attests (Fausto-Sterling,

2000). Intersex individuals possess anatomical features that do not permit clear classiﬁcation of them as either male or

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 3

female. Such ambiguity is not easily tolerated, and intersex persons typically receive medical interventions that ultimately

force them into one category or the other. Given the low base rate of intersex births and the fact that early ‘‘corrective’’

interventions are commonly pursued, we rarely if ever knowingly encounter intersex adults. However, other kinds of

blended categories are becoming increasingly common, particularly the case of multiracial people. In the most recent

national census in the United States, respondents were permitted for the ﬁrst time to select more than one category when

reporting their race; many people did so, and demographic projections indicate that steadily increasing numbers will likely

do so in the future.

When people have one Black parent and one White parent, how will they categorize themselves with respect to race?

How will others categorize them? Will both categories apply, or perhaps neither? Might one of the categories trump the

other in deﬁning an individual’s race? If neither category seems to ﬁt, will new categories be created (see, e.g., Travassos &

Williams, 2004, regarding the variety of distinct interracial categories that are commonly in use in Brazil)? There are a

number of ﬁndings that provide possible answers to these questions. Regarding perceivers’ categorizations of ambiguous

targets, research on the ingroup over-exclusion effect (Leyens & Yzerbyt, 1992) indicates that perceivers often assign

ambiguous cases to outgroup categories rather than ingroups. One prediction following from this idea is that in the case of

Black/White biracial targets, Black perceivers may be more likely to consider the targets to be White, while White

perceivers may be more likely to consider them to be Black. Another, related possibility is that the criteria for membership

in high status groups are more restrictive than those for membership in lower status groups, such that when their category

membership is in doubt, individuals will be assigned to the lower status group (even by people who are not members of

either group). This notion, known as the rule of hypodescent, was invoked as a legal principle deﬁning the ofﬁcially

recognized racial identity of mixed-race persons (Banks & Eberhardt, 1998); that is, such persons were considered to be

members of the lower-status ancestral racial group. Recent developments in molecular genetics indicate that ‘‘we are all

multiracial’’ (Chakravarti, 2009, p. 381), so if a strict imposition of the hypodescent rule were to hold in the US context, it

would mean that we are all Black.

Although in fact long abandoned as an ofﬁcial policy, the hypodescent principle may still be active as an implicit

cultural theory regarding race. In support of this possibility, Peery and Bodenhausen (2008) found that when required to

rapidly categorize ambiguous faces as ‘‘Black’’ or ‘‘not Black,’’ White and Asian perceivers were more likely to

categorize the targets as ‘‘Black’’ if they were known (based on information learned during a previous training session) to

have mixed-race ancestry, compared to when nothing was known about their ancestry. They also categorized these same

faces as ‘‘White’’ or ‘‘not White,’’ and in this case, knowledge of a target’s mixed-race ancestry was associated with a

greater likelihood of choosing the ‘‘not White’’ response. Thus, when a target was explicitly known to have both Black and

White ancestry, he or she was more likely to be reﬂexively categorized by perceivers as Black and not White. Of course,

the ways multiracial people categorize themselves is also a topic of considerable interest. Some evidence suggests that

multiracial youth often feel pressured to choose just one monoracial identity (Herman, 2004). Barack Obama (2004), for

example, wrote poignantly about his reasons for identifying as Black, despite having a White mother. His recent rise to

international prominence raises many interesting questions about how voters construe the race of multiracial candidates

and whether or not these construals correspond to the identities claimed by the candidates themselves (for an overview, see

Peery & Bodenhausen, 2009). Much remains to be learned about the identiﬁcation patterns of multiracial people, but one

general lesson already seems apparent. Although many people assume that having a multiracial background represents a

burden of identity ambiguity that is likely to undermine well being, this is not inherently the case (Shih & Sanchez, 2005).

The psychological difﬁculties that have been associated with multiracial identities are better attributed to subtle but

pervasive cultural messages that devalue or fail to recognize the reality of multiracial status (Sanchez, in press; Townsend,

Markus, & Bergsieker, 2009).

The issue of blended categories clearly provides a rich set of questions that add additional complexity to questions

about how different categories interact with one another. Collectively, the issues reviewed above indicate that social

categorization must be viewed with an eye toward possible interactions between different aspects of a person’s identity.

Next I consider the most frequently considered views regarding the interplay of different social categories.

Models of Multiple Category Management

Several different research programs have addressed identity complexity, from both the perceiver’s and the actor’s

perspective. Depending on the approach, particular psychological structures and processes are postulated to characterize

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

4Galen V. Bodenhausen

how multiple identity facets function in relation to one another. Three possibilities emerge with some consistency across

different research programs, so the discussion below is organized around these three primary patterns.

The ﬁrst pattern is dominance, which occurs when a given identity tends to trump other potential identities, remaining

salient in most circumstances while other identities fall off of the radar screen (Urban & Miller, 1998). To the extent that

other characteristics are noticed, they will tend to function merely as piecemeal, personal features rather than organizing

categorical identities (see Bodenhausen, Macrae, & Sherman, 1999; Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Only the dominant category

retains the power to deﬁne the individual’s social identity. From the perceiver’s perspective, category dominance would be

reﬂected in routinely relying on the same category dimension(s) when construing and reacting to others. A relatively clear-

cut example might be a White racist, who views every non-White person through the lens of race. For such a person, other

considerations such as sex, occupation, age, or religion matter little in comparison to a target’s race. Even people who do

not necessarily explicitly endorse racist ideologies may allow race to dominate other bases for social categorization. Goff,

Thomas, and Jackson (2008) showed that even such a relatively salient category as gender may be trumped by race in a

sample of participants who were highly unlikely to endorse racist ideologies. They brieﬂy exposed White undergraduates

(from a large public American university) to a series of dark-skinned and light-skinned faces and had them categorize the

faces in terms of race and sex. Black faces were categorized by race with very high accuracy, but when it came to sex,

errors were evident, particularly the error of miscategorizing Black females as males (an error rate in excess of 12% in one

study). In contrast, Black males were very rarely miscategorized as females, and both kinds of sex categorization errors

were very rare among White targets. Goff et al. argue that this pattern of errors reﬂects the fact that, by default, the

prototypic member of the category Black is a male. When responding to a person primarily in terms of a dominant

category, prototypic features may be automatically inferred, even if they result in misclassifying the person on another

identity dimension.

The categories that hold the power to dominate other possible bases for categorization are likely to be ones that are

essentialized (Medin & Ortony, 1989), meaning that a deep underlying essence that fundamentally deﬁnes membership in

the category is ascribed. Rothbart and Taylor (1992) described two key characteristics of essentialized categories: (1)

immutability and (2) inductive richness (see also Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). It makes a good deal of sense that

identities that are perceived to be both unchanging and deeply informative would be ones that tend to dominate social

perception. Race (Hirschfeld, 1996) and sex (Prentice & Miller, 2006) are two identity dimensions that tend to be

essentialized to a substantial degree by many social perceivers. One hypothesis following from this analysis is that the

extent to which racism and sexism are expressed in people’s judgments and behaviors may be a function of the degree to

which they essentialize these categories. Indeed, Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst (2002) and Keller (2005) provided

evidence consistent with this idea. More pertinent to the present analysis, one could hypothesize that essentialized social

categories will be the ones that ‘‘pop out’’ most inevitably when we are confronted by multiply categorizable targets.

Stangor, Lynch, Duan, and Glass (1992) provided evidence that race and sex are both used spontaneously in the

categorization of multiply categorizable targets. It would be interesting to determine whether the extent to which this is the

case is related to individual differences in essentialist beliefs regarding these categories. Bastian and Haslam (2006)

provided evidence that individuals who endorse essentialist beliefs in a general way tended to endorse stereotypes about a

number of different social groups, suggesting the operation of a general lay theory (see also Molden & Dweck, 2006).

However, there may nevertheless be differences in the extent to which particular identities are essentialized, and these

differences may predict which identities are likely to form the basis for social categorization (and stereotyping) when

multiply categorizable targets are encountered in the absence of experimental cueing toward particular dimensions.

A challenge to the view that essentialized categories (speciﬁcally, race) will tend to dominate social perception was

provided by several experiments conducted by Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides (2001). They argued that the functionally

most important categories are the ones that track coalitional afﬁliations. Race might look like a category of particular

importance or dominance because it often covaries with people’s coalitional concerns (i.e., people tend to form coalitions

with racial ingroup members), but in the studies conducted by Kurzban et al., race and coalition status were experimentally

unconfounded. Using the ‘‘who-said-what?’’ paradigm (Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978) that has frequently been

employed to examine spontaneous use of social categories, they found that people readily abandon racial categorization

when race no longer marks coalition boundaries. On the other hand, their studies pointed toward the consistent use of sex

as a basis for categorization, regardless of coalition status. Does this result mean that sex inevitably trump other social

categories? A study by Eagly and Kite (1987) paints an interesting picture on this question. Examining the intersections of

national and sex categories, Eagly and Kite found that for male targets, nationality tended to modify the characteristics that

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 5

were stereotypically applied to them. In contrast, female targets tended to be viewed similarly irrespective of their

nationality. One interpretation of this pattern is that low-status essentialized categories will dominate social perception to a

greater extent than high-status essentialized categories. Clearly, the idea that essentialized categories will inevitably

dominate social categorization is untenable, and more research will be required to address questions about when and for

whom such categories will tend to trump other bases for construing others.

Dominance patterns can also characterize self-categorization processes. In their inﬂuential analysis of social identity

complexity, Roccas and Brewer (2002) characterized dominance as one of the less complex forms of managing multiple

social identities. Strict dominance would involve a single identity deﬁning the scope of the person’s ingroup on a cross-

situationally stable basis, with other identities being largely irrelevant. A modiﬁed, hierarchical dominance pattern would

exist when a person takes other aspects of his or her identity into account when thinking about other people who share

membership in this dominant (primary) category, but not when thinking about others who do not share this identity

(Brewer, Ho, Lee, & Miller, 1987). Brewer and Pierce (2005) documented that these relatively simple forms of social

identiﬁcation carry implications not just for self-perceptions but also for how others are judged. Speciﬁcally, outgroups are

deﬁned in a more rigid and monolithic way, and they are accorded less tolerance, when people have low-complexity social

identities.

Why might a single category come to dominate one’s sense of social identity? In the case of minorities and stigmatized

groups, sometimes the external social world can impose these identities on the individual (Polletta & Jasper, 2001), by

virtue of their salience in the minds of many of the people with whom members of these groups interact (and also in

broader cultural representations). Along these lines, Jetten, Branscombe, Schmitt, and Spears (2001) showed that one

common response to discrimination is to identify more strongly with the relevant group. Multiracial people represent an

interesting case that may be an exception to this rule, because as noted above, even though others may attempt to

pigeonhole them into monoracial categories and subject them to corresponding discrimination and stigmatization, their

own sense of self-deﬁnition is likely to be more complex and ﬂuid than that. Along these lines, Pauker and Ambady (2009)

showed that, compared to self-identiﬁed monoracial individuals, self-identiﬁed multiracial people are less likely to be

inﬂuenced by racial category labels when processing faces. A correspondingly lower tendency to essentialize race was

observed in this sample of multiracial people. The importance of psychological essentialism as a moderator of the

dominance pattern was underscored by research showing that the degree to which bicultural individuals hold essentialized

views of race predicts the degree to which their ethnic culture of origin dominates their social identity; moreover, this

essentializing tendency was associated with greater difﬁculty in psychologically moving between the two cultural frames

of reference (Chao, Chen, Roisman, & Hong, 2007).

Recently, Amiot, de la Sablonnie

`re, Terry, and Smith (2007) proposed a stage model of social identity development,

focusing in particular on what happens when taking on a signiﬁcant new identity becomes a possibility. In the early

‘‘categorization’’ stage of their model, distinct aspects of identity exist in isolation from one another and one particular

identity (the oldest, most established one) predominates over the others. This dominant identity is likely to be chronically

salient and to be actively bolstered. The expected course of development from this stage is to acquire an ability to deal with

the uncertainty involved in having more than one identity, such that more than one identity can be recognized and claimed

by the self.

The second commonly recognized pattern of multiple-category management is compartmentalization, which occurs

when various social categories exist as encapsulated, non-overlapping representations that take turns dominating social

perception and self deﬁnition. No category has chronic dominance, and any of them can be momentarily focal while the

others remain dormant. From the perceiver’s perspective, this means that the immediate context will drive which

categories stand out from among the multiple possible bases for categorization. Racism, sexism, and other speciﬁc forms

of prejudice become situated rather than universal phenomena. This idea is at the heart of the activation-inhibition model

of stereotyping proposed by Bodenhausen and Macrae (1998), building on the empirical studies reported in Macrae,

Bodenhausen, and Milne (1995). The model proposes that when multiply categorizable targets are encountered,

those social categories that can be readily discerned will compete with one another for momentary dominance in the

mind of the perceiver. For the winning category, stereotypes associated with the category will be activated and applied

to the target (unless they are unambiguously contradicted by available information). For other initially contending

categories, the activation levels of their associated stereotypes will be actively inhibited, potentially producing lower

accessibility than under baseline conditions (see Macrae et al., 1995). The model proposes a range of variables that can

bias which of the competing categories will win the contest for momentary dominance, including the frequency and

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

6Galen V. Bodenhausen

recency of a category’s prior activation, the situational and general distinctiveness of a given identity, and the degree of ﬁt

between the target’s behavior and category prototypes (i.e., normative ﬁt) among others.

In addition to the evidence reviewed in Bodenhausen and Macrae (1998), more recent studies on cross-cutting social

categories supports the idea that stereotypes tend to be activated and applied in an ‘‘either/or’’ manner. That is, when

stereotypes are activated about one identity, stereotypes about other potential bases of categorization do not appear to be

inﬂuential, in keeping with the idea that they are inhibited. For example, Pittinsky, Shih, and Trahan (2006) exposed

perceivers to targets that could be categorized on the basis of their ethnicity and/or their sex, and they looked for evidence

of sex and ethnic stereotyping in reactions to these targets. Participants who were subtly cued to attend to sex applied

gender (but not ethnic) stereotypes to the target, while those who were cued toward ethnicity applied ethnic (but not

gender) stereotypes. Klauer, Ehrenberg, and Wegener (2003) and van Rijswijk and Ellemers (2002) also reported evidence

that stereotyping of multiply categorizable targets follows an either/or (i.e., compartmentalization) pattern.

Research has also examined these dynamics as they apply to self-categorization. In the Roccas and Brewer (2002)

model of social identity complexity, compartmentalization represents a more complex form of identiﬁcation in which

different identities come to the fore in different circumstances (see also Amiot et al., 2007). This idea clearly resonates

with the main themes of self-categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987). Another research tradition that ﬁts well with the

notion of compartmentalization is work on cultural frame-switching in bicultural persons (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-

Martı

´nez, 2000). Here the idea is that bicultural individuals often possess two distinct cultural identities that take turns

controlling processes of self-regulation in different contexts, depending on situational cues to the relevance of a given

identity. One such cue may be language, and some research suggests that when using different languages, people appear to

be expressing different personalities, presumably due to the invocation of different, culturally deﬁned norms for behavior

within each group of language users (Ramı

´rez-Esparza, Gosling, Benet-Martı

´nez, Potter, & Pennebaker, 2004). Chiao,

Heck, Nakayama, and Ambady (2006) showed that even low-level perceptual and attentional processes could be modiﬁed

by frame-switching. Compartmentalization effects of this sort are not limited to ethnically deﬁned cultural identities.

Hugenberg and Bodenhausen (2004) studied college students who held memberships in fraternities and sororities, and thus

had a ‘‘Greek system’’ identity as well as a more superordinate ‘‘university student’’ identity. These two identities are

associated with quite different ‘‘cultures,’’ or norms for self-regulation. Hugenberg and Bodenhausen showed that when

one of these identities was salient, its associated norms became more cognitively accessible, while the norms of the rival

identity were actively inhibited.

In Amiot et al.’s (2007) developmental model, the compartmentalization stage is the point at which different identities

gradually come to be seen as complementary rather than oppositional. Compartmentalization of oppositional identities

would be expected to produce different kinds of cognitive consequences, compared to when identities are viewed as

complementary aspects of the self; indeed, Benet-Martı

´nez, Leu, Lee, and Morris (2002) showed that standard frame-

switching effects like those reviewed above are not found among individuals with multiple identities that seem to them to

work in opposition to one another. In fact, for such people, situational cues that would normally trigger the use of a

particular cultural frame often evoke responses that are more typical of the alternative (subjectively opposed) identity.

This brings us to the third possibility for managing multiple social categories, the idea of category integration. From the

perceiver’s perspective, integration involves taking note of more than one of a target’s social category memberships and

using them in some simultaneous fashion in responding to the target. They could be used additively, as often seen in

research on evaluations of cross-categorized targets (Crisp & Hewstone, 2007). Alternatively, they could interact in some

manner such that the impact of one categorical identity is modiﬁed by the presence of other one(s). Exactly this kind of

interactive process is hypothesized in Kunda and Thagard’s (1996) parallel-constraint-satisfaction model of stereotyping

in impression formation. Models of subtyping and subgrouping (Richards & Hewstone, 2001) can also be viewed as

instances of category integration, to the extent that they are deﬁned by conjunctions of categorical identities (see also

Hutter & Crisp, 2005; Kunda, Miller, & Claire, 1990). For example, consider encountering a male hairdresser, Sergio, at

the local salon. Compartmentalization would imply that Sergio is perceived either as a male or as a hairdresser, but

integration would be evident if these two identities form a meaningful subtype having its own stereotypical associations.

Whereas the category interactions proposed in Kunda and Thagard’s model are dynamic and would be expected to change

across contexts, the category interactions involved in subtyping and subgrouping may be much more stable. Indeed, they

may be thought of as creating a new, ﬁrmly fused categorical identity that can potentially be activated and used in a

consistent way across contexts (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998). Even if encountered in another social situation, such as an

anti-war protest, Sergio might still be perceived and evaluated in terms of his male hairdresser identity.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 7

Of course, perceivers can also form individuated impressions of multiply categorizable targets (Brewer, 1988; Fiske &

Neuberg, 1990). We might think of individuation as the ultimate in category integration, in that perceivers reconcile the

implications of multiple identities (e.g., male, politician, African American, liberal, sports fan, dog-lover, etc.) in forming

an impression of the target. However, in this situation the various facets of the individual may actually not function as

organizing categories any longer, but instead may serve merely as a set of personal attributes. In this sense, the multiple

category problem is transformed into a matter of multiattribute evaluation (see, e.g., Bodenhausen and Peery, 2009).

The issue of identity integration has been richly explored from the perspective of self-categorization processes. In the

Roccas and Brewer (2002) model of social identity complexity, the most complex form of social identiﬁcation is called

merger, which involves the simultaneous recognition of multiple categories as being self-deﬁning (e.g., occupation,

ethnicity, sex, etc.). Across different contexts, multiple identities may remain salient and inﬂuential. For example, in a

context that makes ethnicity highly salient, a person with a merged social identity would still be likely to feel a sense of

shared identity with an ethnic outgroup member who happened to share the same occupation. Roccas and Brewer review

numerous variables that can increase the probability that social identity merger will occur, including the experience of

societal diversity, the presence of relevant individual needs and motives, variations in stress, and many others.

Identity integration is also a topic of great interest in research on multiracial and bicultural individuals (e.g., Benet-

Martı

´nez & Haritatos, 2005; Cheng & Lee, 2009). The general ﬁnding is that greater integration of these identities is

associated with greater well being and more effective social functioning (e.g., Phinney, Horenczyk, Liebkind, & Vedder,

2001). Cheng and Lee argued that multiracial individuals’ degree of identity integration depends on (a) how much

dissimilarity they perceive to exist between the racial groups that constitute their own ancestry and (b) how much conﬂict

they perceive to exist between these groups. They also showed that the degree of integration is at least somewhat malleable

and subject to experimental manipulation. Within this variability, there may be a general developmental trajectory to

acquire a more stable sense of identity integration over time (Amiot et al., 2007). Strategies for resolving any apparent

inconsistencies or conﬂict between identities may be discovered and implemented over time, laying the groundwork for a

more integrated, complex social identity (Tadmore & Tetlock, 2006). Achieving an integrated social identity does not

preclude continuing to show evidence of frame-switching across contexts (Benet-Martı

´nez et al., 2002). It does not mean

that there will no longer be any contextually driven shifts in momentary self-deﬁnition, but it does imply a greater

overarching sense of personal integrity because the different self-elements do not seem to be fundamentally at odds with

one another.

The research reviewed in this section makes it clear that the diversity that exists within the individual can result in a

range of different patterns of social perception and self-perception. In some circumstances a simple focus on a single

identity dimension may be sufﬁcient to capture the relevant psychological dynamics, but in many other cases multiple

categories need to be considered.

DIVERSITY IN THE GROUP

There has been increasing interest in recent years in understanding the challenges and opportunities that arise from diverse

social groups, such as work teams, juries, and classrooms. In this section I explore the implications of within-person

diversity for addressing these questions about group diversity. I begin by providing a very brief overview of the group

diversity literature.

Sometimes diversity within groups is deﬁned in terms of the extent to which different group members possess different

information or cognitive skills, but most commonly, people think of group diversity in terms of basic demographic

categories—particularly race/ethnicity and sex. The growing interest in how diversity inﬂuences a group’s functioning is

timely, because all demographic trends point to the emergence of increasingly diverse societies in which many kinds of

working groups are expected to be characterized by a greater degree of diversity (Golembiewski, 1995). A common

presumption is that diversity should enhance group performance, because people with different backgrounds can be

expected to bring different knowledge and skills to group tasks. Indeed, as the political economist Page (2007) shows, it is

a logically derivable verity that groups having cognitive diversity of this sort will outperform groups selected on a more

singular basis (e.g., selecting the individuals with the highest aptitude test scores). At the same time, the introduction of

diversity into a group could create socioemotional tensions of the sort that have often been observed to arise in intergroup

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

8Galen V. Bodenhausen

situations. If members of different subgroups indeed do subjectively deﬁne the situation as an intergroup setting, then

in(sub)group favoritism and related intergroup tendencies can begin to poison the morale and interpersonal relations

within the group. In combination, these two ideas suggest that beneﬁts from group diversity are possible but certainly not

inevitable.

Inﬂuential reviews of the empirical literature on the consequences of group diversity (Mannix & Neale, 2005; Milliken

& Martins, 1996; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998) have concluded that the evidence is very mixed. On one hand, there is indeed

evidence that racial diversity can enhance the quality of group task performance (e.g., Antonio, Chang, Hakuta, Kenny,

Levin, & Milem, 2004; Ely & Thomas, 2001), and not just by virtue of minority group members bringing new perspectives

to the table. The presence of a different subgroup can also create competitive motivation resulting in performance

increments (Lount & Phillips, 2007), and the presence of a minority group member can lead majority group members to

think in more complex ways (Sommers, 2006; Sommers, Warp, & Mahoney, 2008). At the same time, there is evidence

that the interpersonal dynamics within a group can suffer after the introduction of diverse group members (e.g., Harrison,

Price, & Bell, 1998). In order to provide an integrative conceptualization of these kinds of ﬁndings, van Knippenberg, De

Dreu, and Homan (2004) proposed their categorization/elaboration model of diversity, which recognizes the possibility of

both negative effects arising from intergroup biases but also positive effects arising from the group’s cognitive

diversiﬁcation. The model speciﬁes key variables that moderate the consequences of group diversity, and the most central

of these is what van Knippenberg et al. term ‘‘diversity beliefs,’’ or lay theories containing assumptions about whether

diversity is a good or a bad thing for a group’s functioning. In support of this idea, van Dick, van Knippenberg, Ha

¨gele,

Guillaume, and Brodbeck (2008) showed in two longitudinal studies that, to the extent group members hold pro-diversity

beliefs, diversity increased their degree of cognitive elaboration on group tasks. Homan, van Knippenberg, Van Kleef, and

De Dreu (2007) further showed that it is possible to manipulate diversity beliefs, with the consequence of better group

performance when groups actually were diverse.

Respects for Group Diversity

Once one accepts the fact that people are inherently multifaceted, and that the extent to which any given social category is

spontaneously seen as relevant can vary across contexts, it becomes clear that the level of diversity within a group depends

on which respects for diversity one considers. Consider a Black Christian woman who joins a law ﬁrm that is otherwise

populated by White Jewish men. Clearly this represents an increase in the diversity of the group on three demographic

dimensions, but do the majority group members register all of these forms of diversiﬁcation? Do they all matter, and if so,

do they matter to an equivalent degree? Or might their relative importance change from one context to another? As

reviewed above, there are many possibilities. The problem of determining which respects matter for diversity assessments

is analogous to the general problem of determining the respects that should be used for assessments of (dis)similarity; the

shifting comparative context is likely to matter a lot (Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, 1993). These considerations point to

the importance of considering subjective or perceived diversity as a causal variable having its own importance—perhaps

having more immediate causal signiﬁcance in shaping group dynamics and performance outcomes than ‘‘objective’’

diversity; however that is deﬁned (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Zellmer-Bruhn, Maloney, Bhappu, & Salvador, 2008; see also

Harrison & Klein, 2007).

It may be that some of the inconsistent ﬁndings in the prior research on group diversity result from a failure to consider

possible divergences between research participants’ perceptions of diversity and the distribution of ‘‘objective’’ group

characteristics on which researchers choose to focus their attention in deﬁning group diversity. Garcia-Prieto, Erwan, and

Schneider (2003) proposed a model of team diversity that explicitly acknowledges the possibility of shifting respects for

diversity within a given group. They argued that momentary social identity salience is inﬂuenced by a number of variables,

including motivational states (such as a desire for distinctiveness or assimilation; see Brewer, 1991), the situational

relevance (normative ﬁt) of an identity, the visibility and contextual distinctiveness of a given identity (see Nelson &

Miller, 1995), others’ reactions and expectations, etc. Once salient, these categories can then determine which goals and

norms are salient as well as guide perceptions of other team members (Early & Mosakowski, 2000; Randel, 2002).

The same basic idea was taken up by Zellmer-Bruhn et al. (2008) in a study that examined changes in the subjective

diversity of groups that unfold over time. They focused on momentary perceptions of (dis)similarity with other team

members as an index of contextually deﬁned subjective diversity. As in other diversity research, they distinguished

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 9

between ‘‘surface-level’’ diversity, which they deﬁned in terms of social category similarity, and ‘‘deeper’’ diversity,

deﬁned in their study in terms of the perceived similarity of workstyles across members. When a group is newly formed,

Zellmer-Bruhn et al. assume that the most obvious social categories (sex, ethnicity, nationality) will shape perceptions of

social category similarity within a group, and these perceptions will in turn lead to assumptions about the degree of

similarity on less immediately obvious characteristics, such as workstyle. As these other respects for deﬁning diversity

come into focus (in the course of interpersonal observation and information sharing during group interaction), subjective

diversity should change. More generally, any variable that leads people to focus on different aspects of themselves or

others should modify how and whether group diversity is momentarily experienced.

Managing Identity Complexities in Group Diversity

Given that the salience of different social identities can change within a group, it becomes important to consider questions

about how multiple identities can interact and inﬂuence one another within the group context. Taking as a starting point a

group that is in fact characterized by heterogeneity, how are these complexities perceived, both by group members

themselves as well as outsiders? Here, we can turn to the same basic possibilities that govern the perception of

multifaceted individuals.

Dominance

If a particular categorical dimension dominates perception of the group, then the crucial question is whether there is

variability within the group on that particular dimension. If sex were the dominant category dimension and all group

members were men, then it would not matter whether some men were Asian and some Caucasian; the group would be

perceived as homogeneous, or low in diversity. On the other hand, if sex were the dominant category dimension and the

group consisted of both women and men, then the group would be perceived as diverse. Dominance of this sort might

conceivably emerge when the group’s activities are strongly associated with a particular social category, for example if the

group’s task is a stereotypically masculine, agentic task. If women are present in the group, then it will be perceived as a

diverse group. However, it may not necessarily be the case that if only men are present in the group, then no diversity will

be perceived. Instead, in such a case, bases for categorization other than sex may suggest themselves to the perceiver

(cf. Eagly & Kite, 1987).

A presumably more frequent basis for category dominance in a workgroup context would be a strong identiﬁcation of

the group members with the workgroup itself. If there is a sense of shared purpose, then the group’s functional identity

(e.g., ‘‘the computer support team’’) could dominate, leading again to low perceived diversity (we are/they are all ‘‘tech

geeks,’’ and race, sex, nationality, etc., makes little additional difference).

Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization, as applied to a group, would imply perceiving meaningful subcategories within the group that

would be salient to different degrees, depending on the context. If there is no strongly dominant category, then the respects

that are used for determining a group’s diversity should be quite malleable. Depending on the actual compositional

properties of the group, it could be perceived as diverse in some contexts (e.g., when sex is salient) but as homogeneous in

others (e.g., when race is salient). At the group level, however, circumstances may work against the dynamic malleability

of perceived diversity. In particular, the presence of multiple basis for diversity within the group can result in the potential

development of ‘‘faultlines’’ within a group (Lau & Murnighan, 1998). Faultlines emerge to the extent that multiple bases

for categorization coincide, such that an intergroup situation exists on more than one dimension concurrently. For

example, if it were the case that all of the women in a mixed-sex work group also differed from the men in terms of their

age (e.g., the women are younger than the men) and their ethnicity (e.g., the women are not White and the men are), then a

serious psychological faultline could emerge, and the tendency to see the group as being composed of two distinct

subgroups would be harder to resist. Compartmentalization would likely not result in dynamically shifting perceptions in

such a case, because any salient basis for categorizing group members would result in the same sorting of individuals into

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

10 Galen V. Bodenhausen

subgroups. As previously noted, the research on crossed categorizations indicates that outgroup memberships tend to be

additive; thus, simultaneous recognition of multiple bases for outgroup status should enhance the tendency toward

evaluative differentiation between the two factions (Crisp & Hewstone, 2007). Available research in the context of

organizational faultlines suggests a possibly more complex set of evaluative consequences (Thatcher, Jehn, & Zanutto, 2003).

In particular, Thatcher et al. found a curvilinear pattern such that the presence of ‘‘medium’’ faultlines resulted in better group

morale and productivity than either strong faultlines or a lack of faultlines in heterogeneous groups (i.e., groups that are high in

diversity, but for which the various bases for categorization do not align in a manner that creates faultlines).

If the dynamics of intergroup evaluation are not necessarily as straightforward as relevant theory would suggest, the

possible consequences for stereotyping processes remain even more uncertain. As previously discussed, currently

available research indicates that stereotyping of multiply categorizable targets is often based on just one of the possible

categorical identities. If a faultline exists, which of the intergroup-deﬁning variables will be the focus of stereotyping? Will

one of the categorical dimensions dominate the others in a stable manner, or will this shift across different contexts? In a

workgroup context, it may be that a particular dimension will stand out as being most relevant and may thus tend to

dominate the other dimensions in deﬁning the relevant stereotypes. Perceived relevance may often be a function of

stereotypic expectations about the group’s task (e.g., seeing it as an agentic, ‘‘male’’ task results in an emphasis on gender,

while seeing it as a task requiring extensive experience results in an emphasis on age). Many important questions arise

about the malleability of the stereotypic impressions each subgroup may have of the other, and how potential contextual

shifts in these intergroup images might inﬂuence salient diversity beliefs (i.e., whether diversity is seen as valuable or

problematic).

Integration

Subjective diversity and diversity-related beliefs within a group should also vary as a function of group members’ social

identity complexity. When individuals see their own identities in a more complex and integrated way, they are likely to

perceive— and be more accepting of— diversity within the group. Individuals with more complex social identities may be

less likely to perceive a rigid subgroup structure within a group, because they are better able to appreciate shared identity

facets even when they differ from others in some seemingly fundamental way (Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Even if they do

end up construing the situation as one involving distinct subgroups, the consequences may not be as problematic among

people with more complex social identities. One of the critical factors determining whether diversity within a group is

problematic or advantageous is the extent to which members of different subgroups feel respected and recognized within

the overarching group (Hornsey & Hogg, 2000). As Brewer and Pierce (2005) have shown, individuals with highly

complex social identities are more accepting of ostensible outgroup members and thus less prone to fall into a negative

intergroup dynamic with them.

Research on identity integration in the case of bicultural identities is also relevant. Particularly in cases that

change longstanding precedents (e.g., cases where women and minorities enter into arenas that were historically the

exclusive purview of white males), the situation can be perceived as a ‘‘culture clash’’ and the individuals involved need to

negotiate a new, common culture in which all parties can participate. Until identity integration occurs, the distinct

identities may be perceived as oppositional, and individuals may feel that their social identities are not valued. Swann,

Polzer, Seyle, and Ko (2004) argued that people in groups seek veriﬁcation of both their personal and their social identities.

They report evidence indicating that veriﬁcation of personal self-views results in better interpersonal dynamics within a

group, while veriﬁcation of social self-views results in greater commitment to the group as a whole. When an oppositional

structure is perceived to characterize a group setting (e.g., ‘‘I am a woman, but women are not taken seriously in this

group’’), individuals may perceive themselves to face a dilemma. Either they can attempt to distance themselves from the

undervalued identity, or they can maintain their social identity but feel alienated from the group. The prospects for

managing this dilemma effectively may depend on the individual’s level of social identity complexity. With relativelynon-

complex identities, the situation may indeed be experienced as a difﬁcult dilemma arising from oppositional aspects of the

self. Individuals with a compartmentalized social identity may be better able to navigate such situations effectively, because

they can temporarily de-emphasize particular identities while in the group setting and still feel a measure of social self-

veriﬁcation based on other aspects of their identity. Individuals with integrated social identities (‘‘merger,’’ in the terminology

of Roccas and Brewer, 2002) may be in the best position to deal with group diversity, because they can ﬁnd bases for social

self-veriﬁcation in many diverse ways and may not experience any sense of inherent oppositionality in the situation.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 11

Along these lines, Cheng et al. (2008) recently argued that individuals with high levels of identity integration are best

positioned to realize the hypothesized beneﬁts of diverse group settings. In terms of social-emotional processes, such

individuals should have the greatest comfort with diversity and should be much less inclined to see different social

identities as necessarily reﬂecting conﬂict or incompatibility. In terms of task performance, individuals with highly

integrated social identities have been shown to have better access to disparate knowledge and skill sets, making them better

able to contribute to problem solving and other aspects of group productivity (Cheng, Sanchez-Burks, & Lee, 2007).

Obviously the effectiveness of teams and groups is not strictly a function of the characteristics of individual members.

Even if a group is composed of many individuals with highly integrated social identities, psychological and social-

structural features of the task environment are still relevant in either affording the opportunity for successfully exploiting

the potential value of these individual assets or, alternatively, blocking their expression (Hornsey & Hogg, 2000; Sanchez-

Burks & Lee, 2007). This suggests that in order to manage team diversity effectively, the working environment should be

engineered in ways that promote the recognition and valuing of complex social identities, allowing for group members to

experience social self-veriﬁcation within the group. Such experiences may actually have the beneﬁcial consequence of

promoting the development of more integrated, complex social identities within group members, for example through the

developmental mechanisms described by Amiot et al. (2007). One thing does appear to be clear — experiencing diverse

environments can carry important beneﬁts for the individual. Antonio et al. (2004) provided evidence that greater racial

diversity within students’ social networks is associated with higher levels of integrative complexity in their reasoning, and

Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, and Chiu (2008) showed that the extent which individuals have been exposed to multiple

cultures predicts many important cognitive skills associated with creative thinking and problem solving. To the extent that

individuals feel valued by (and committed to) a group, they are best positioned to offer these skills in the service of

pursuing the group’s goals.

CONCLUSION

Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual,

both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable

targets, as well as from the perspective of actors using their different self-aspects as a framework for guiding their

interactions with the social world. I have reviewed numerous, disparate contributions to the effort to better understand

these issues, and I explored some of their possible implications for understanding the nature and consequences of diversity

within the group. One general conclusion suggested by the available evidence is that there can be reciprocal beneﬁcial

relationships between social identity complexity within the individual and diversity within the group. Individuals with a

more complex sense of self may be better able to offer diverse cognitive skills and knowledge in a group task environment,

and it is this cognitive diversity that lies at the heart of the beneﬁts of team diversity for group performance (Page, 2007).

They may also be able to navigate the group environment with greater facility and thus contribute to positive interpersonal

dynamics within the group. Conversely, experiencing diverse group environments provides individuals with opportunities

to develop greater creativity and more integratively complex self-understandings. In short, diversity in the person and

diversity in the group can potentially complement one another, resulting in better functioning at both levels.

However, much remains to be explored when it comes to these issues. The perceived and experienced sense of identity

remains one of the key explanatory variables for social psychological theory (e.g., Markus, 2005; Tajfel, 1974), and there

are still many issues to be empirically investigated concerning the ways whereby different self-aspects inﬂuence how

identiﬁcations arise, particularly in diverse group settings that afford many distinct opportunities for categorizing the self

and others.

REFERENCES

Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Amiot, C. E., de la Sablonnie

`re, R., Terry, D. J., & Smith, J. R. (2007). Integration of social identities in the self: Toward a cognitive-

developmental model. Personality and Social Psychology Review,11, 364–388.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

12 Galen V. Bodenhausen

Antonio, A. L., Chang, M. J., Hakuta, K., Kenny, D. A., Levin, S., & Milem, J. F. (2004). Effects of racial diversity on complex thinking

in college students. Psychological Science,15, 507–510.

Ashforth, B. E., & Mael, F. (1989). Social identity theory and the organization. Academy of Management Review,14, 20–39.

Banks, R. R., & Eberhardt, J. L. (1998). Social psychological processes and the legal bases of racial categorization. In J. L. Eberhardt, &

S. T. Fiske (Eds.), Confronting racism: The problem and the response (pp. 54–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Barden, J., Maddux, W. W., Petty, R. E., & Brewer, M. B. (2004). Contextual moderation of racial bias: The impact of social roles on

controlled and automatically activated attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,87, 5–22.

Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2006). Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,

42, 228–235.

Benet-Martı

´nez, V., & Haritatos, J. (2005). Bicultural identity integration (BII): Components and psychological antecedents. Journal of

Personality,73, 1015–1050.

Benet-Martı

´nez, V., Leu, J., Lee, F., & Morris, M. W. (2002). Negotiating biculturalism: Cultural frame switching in biculturals with

oppositional versus compatible cultural identities. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,33, 492–516.

Bodenhausen, G. V., & Macrae, C. N. (1998). Stereotype activation and inhibition. In R. S. Wyer, Jr (Ed.), Stereotype activation and

inhibition: Advances in social cognition (Vol. 11, pp. 1–52). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bodenhausen, G. V., Macrae, C. N., & Sherman, J. W. (1999). On the dialectics of discrimination: Dual processes in social stereotyping.

In S. Chaiken, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual process theories in social psychology (pp. 271–290). New York: Guilford.

Bodenhausen, G. V., & Peery, D. (2009). Social categorization and stereotyping in vivo: The VUCA challenge. Social & Personality

Psychology Compass,3, 133–151.

Brewer, M. B. (1988). A dual process model of impression formation. In T. K. Srull, & R. S. Wyer, Jr (Eds.), A dual process model of

impression formation: Advances in social cognition (Vol. 1, pp. 1–36). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same and different at the same time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,17,

475–482.

Brewer, M. B., Ho, H., Lee, J., & Miller, N. (1987). Social identity and social distance among Hong Kong school children. Personality

and Social Psychology Bulletin,13, 156–165.

Brewer, M. B., & Pierce, K. P. (2005). Social identity complexity and outgroup tolerance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,

31, 428–437.

Burke, K. (1945). A grammar of motives. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Chakravarti, A. (2009). Kinship: Race relations. Nature,457, 380–381.

Chao, M. M., Chen, J., Roisman, G. I., & Hong, Y-y. (2007). Essentializing race: Implications for bicultural individuals’ cognition and

physiological reactivity. Psychological Science,18, 341–348.

Cheng, C.-Y., & Lee, F. (2009). Multiracial identity integration: Perceptions of conﬂict and distance among multiracial individuals.

Journal of Social Issues,65, 51–68.

Cheng, C.-Y., Sanchez-Burks, J., & Lee, F. (2007). Increasing individual-level innovation through identity-integration. Academy of

Management Best Paper Proceedings.

Cheng, C.-Y., Sanders, M., Sanchez-Burks, J., Molina, K., Lee, F., Darling, E., et al. (2008). Reaping the rewards of diversity: The role of

identity integration. Social and Personality Psychology Compass,2, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00103.x

Chiao, J. Y., Heck, H. E., Nakayama, K., & Ambady, N. (2006). Priming race in biracial observers affects visual search for Black and

White faces. Psychological Science,17, 387–392.

Crisp, R. J., & Hewstone, M. (2007). Multiple social categorization. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology

(Vol. 39, pp. 163–254). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Devine, P. G., & Baker, S. M. (1991). Measurement of racial stereotype subtyping. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,17, 44–

50.

Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S., & Taguy, S. (2009). Commonality and the complexity of ‘‘we’’: Social attitudes and social change.

Personality and Social Psychology Review,13, 3–20.

Eagly, A. H., & Kite, M. E. (1987). Are stereotypes of nationalities applied to both women and men? Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology,53, 451–462.

Early, P. C., & Mosakowski, E. (2000). Creating hybrid team culture: An empirical test of international team functioning. Academy of

Management Journal,43, 26–49.

Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V. J., & Johnson, S. L. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black

defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science,17, 383–386.

Ely, R. J., & Thomas, D. A. (2001). Cultural diversity at work: The effects of diversity perspectives on work group processes and

outcomes. Administrative Science Quarterly,46, 229–273.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum model of impression formation from category-based to individuation processes:

Inﬂuences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social

psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 1–74). New York: Academic Press.

Garcia-Marques, L., Santos, A. S. C., & Mackie, D. M. (2006). Stereotypes: Static abstractions or dynamic knowledge structures?

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,91, 814–831.

Garcia-Prieto, P., Bellard, E., & Schneider, S. C. (2003). Experiencing diversity, conﬂict, and emotions in teams. Applied Psychology,

52, 413–440.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 13

Goff, P. A., Thomas, M. A., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). ‘‘Ain’t I a woman?’’: Towards an intersectional approach to person perception and

group-based harms. Sex Roles,59, 392–403.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books.

Golembiewski, R. T. (1995). Managing diversity in organizations. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Harrison, D. A., & Klein, K. J. (2007). What’s the difference? Diversity constructs as separation, variety, or disparity in organizations.

Academy of Management Review,32, 1199–1228.

Harrison, D. A., Price, K. H., & Bell, M. P. (1998). Beyond relational demography: Time and the effects of surface- and deep-level

diversity on work group cohesion. Academy of Management Journal,41, 96–107.

Haslam, N., Rothschild, L., & Ernst, D. (2000). Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology,39,

113–127.

Haslam, N., Rothschild, L., & Ernst, D. (2002). Are essentialist beliefs associated with prejudice? British Journal of Social Psychology,

41, 87–100.

Herman, M. (2004). Forced to choose: Some determinants of racial identiﬁcation in multi-racial adolescents. Child Development,75,

730–748.

Hirschfeld, L. A. (1996). Race in the making: Cognition, culture, and the child’s construction of human kinds. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

Homan, A. C., van Knippenberg, D., Van Kleef, G. A., & De Dreu, C. K. W. (2007). Bridging faultlines by valuing diversity: Diversity

beliefs, information elaboration, and performance in diverse work groups. Journal of Applied Psychology,92, 1189–1199.

Hong, Y-y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C-y., & Benet-Martı

´nez, V. (2000). Multicultural minds: A dynamic constructivist approach to culture

and cognition. American Psychologist,55, 709–720.

Hornsey, M. J., & Hogg, M. A. (2000). Assimilation and diversity: An integrative model of subgroup relations. Personality and Social

Psychology Review,4, 143–156.

Hugenberg, K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2004). Category membership moderates the inhibition of social identities. Journal of

Experimental Social Psychology,40, 233–238.

Hutter, R. R. C., & Crisp, R. J. (2005). The composition of category conjunctions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,31, 647–

657.

Jetten, J., Branscombe, N. R., Schmitt, M. T., & Spears, R. (2001). Rebels with a cause: Group identiﬁcation as a response to perceived

discrimination from the mainstream. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,27, 1204–1213.

Keller, J. (2005). In genes we trust: The biological component of psychological essentialism and its relationship to mechanisms of

motivated social cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,88, 686–702.

Klauer, K. C., Ehrenberg, K., & Wegener, I. (2003). Crossed categorization and stereotyping: Structural analyses, effects patterns, and

dissociative effects of context relevance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,39, 332–354.

Kunda, Z., Miller, D. T., & Claire, T. (1990). Combining social concepts: The role of causal reasoning. Cognitive Science,14, 551–577.

Kunda, Z., & Thagard, P. (1996). Forming impressions from stereotypes, traits, and behaviors: A parallel-constraint-satisfaction theory.

Psychological Review,103, 284–308.

Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of

the National Academy of Science USA,98, 15387–15392.

Lau, D., & Murnighan, J. K. (1998). Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizational groups.

Academy of Management Review,23, 325–340.

Leung, A. K-y., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., & Chiu, C-y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity: The when and how.

American Psychologist,63, 169–181.

Leyens, J.-P., & Yzerbyt, V. Y. (1992). The ingroup overexclusion effect: Impact of valence and conﬁrmation on stereotypical

information search. European Journal of Social Psychology,22, 549–569.

Lount, R. B., Jr., & Phillips, K. W. (2007). Working harder with the out-group: The impact of social category diversity on motivation

gains. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,103, 214–224.

Macrae, C. N., Bodenhausen, G. V., & Milne, A. B. (1995). The dissection of selection in social perception: Inhibitory processes in

social stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,69, 397–407.

Maddox, K. B. (2004). Perspectives on racial phenotypicality bias. Personality and Social Psychology Review,8, 383–401.

Mannix, E., & Neale, M. A. (2005). What differences make a difference? The promise and reality of diverse teams and organizations.

Psychological Science in the Public Interest,6, 31–55.

Markus, H. R. (2005). On telling less than we can know: The too tacit wisdom of social psychology. Psychological Inquiry,16, 180–184.

Medin, D. L., Goldstone, R. L., & Gentner, D. (1993). Respects for similarity. Psychological Review,100, 254–278.

Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou, & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical

reasoning (pp. 179–195). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mendoza-Denton, R., Park, S. H., & O’Connor, A. (2008). Gender stereotypes as situation-behavior proﬁles. Journal of Experimental

Social Psychology,44, 971–982.

Milliken, F. J., &Martins, L. L. (1996). Searching for common threads: Understanding the multiple effects of diversity on organizational

groups. Academy of Management Review,21, 402–433.

Molden, D. C., & Dweck, C. S. (2006). Finding ‘‘meaning’’ in psychology: A lay theories approach to self-regulation, social perception,

and social development. American Psychologist,61, 192–203.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

14 Galen V. Bodenhausen

Mussweiler, T., Gabriel, S., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2000). Shifting social identities as a strategy for deﬂecting threatening social

comparisons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,79, 398–409.

Nelson, L. J., & Miller, D. T. (1995). The distinctiveness effect in social categorization: You are what makes you unusual. Psychological

Science,6, 246–249.

Oakes, P. J. (1987). The salience of social categories. In J. C. Turner, M. A. Hogg, P. J. Oakes, S. D. Reicher, & M. S. Wetherell (Eds.),

Rediscovering the social group (pp. 117–141). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Obama, B. (2004). Dreams from my father: A story of race and inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Page, S. E. (2007). The difference: How the power of diversity creates better groups, ﬁrms, schools, and societies. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Pauker, K., & Ambady, N. (2009). Multiracial faces: How categorization affects memory at the boundaries of race. Journal of Social

Issues,65, 69–86.

Peery, D., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2008). Black þWhite ¼Black: Hypodescent in reﬂexive categorization of racially ambiguous faces.

Psychological Science,19, 973–977.

Peery, D., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2009). Ambiguity and ambivalence in the voting booth and beyond: A social-psychological

perspective on racial attitudes and behavior in the Obama era. Du Bois Review,6, DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X09090067.

Penner, A. M., & Saperstein, A. (2008). How social status shapes race. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,105,

19628–19630.

Phinney, J. S., Horenczyk, G., Liebkind, K., & Vedder, P. (2001). Ethnic identity, immigration, and well-being: An interactional

perspective. Journal of Social Issues,57, 493–510.

Pittinsky, T. L., Shih, M. J., & Trahan, A. (2006). Identity cues: Evidence from and for intra-individual perspectives on positive and

negative stereotyping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology,36, 2215–2239.

Polletta, F., & Jasper, J. M. (2001). Collective identity and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology,27, 283–305.

Prentice, D. A., & Miller, D. T. (2006). Essentializing differences between women and men. Psychological Science,17, 129–135.

Ramı

´rez-Esparza, N., Gosling, S. D., Benet-Martı

´nez, V., Potter, J. P., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Do bilinguals have two personalities?

A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality,40, 99–120.

Randel, A. E., (2002). Identity salience: A moderator of the relationship between group gender composition and work group conﬂict.

Journal of Organizational Behavior,23, 749–766.

Richards, Z., & Hewstone, M. (2001). Subtyping and subgrouping: Processes for the prevention and promotion of stereotype change.

Personality and Social Psychology Review,5, 52–73.

Roccas, S., & Brewer, M. B. (2002). Social identity complexity. Personality and Social Psychology Review,6, 88–106.

Rothbart, M., & Taylor, M. (1992). Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In G. Semin, & K.

Fiedler (Eds.), Language, interaction and social cognition (pp. 11–36). London: Sage.

Sanchez, D. T. (in press). How do forced-choice dilemmas affect multiracial people? The role of identity autonomy and public regard in

depressive symptoms. Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Sanchez-Burks, J., & Lee, F. (2007). Culture and workways. In S. Kitayama, & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology

(Vol. 1, pp. 346–369). New York: Guilford.

Sherif, M. (1948). An outline of social psychology. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Shih, M., & Sanchez, D. T. (2005). Perspectives and research on the positive and negative implications of having multiple racial

identities. Psychological Bulletin,131, 569–591.

Sommers, S. R. (2006). On racial diversity and group decision making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury

deliberations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,90, 597–612.

Sommers, S. R., Warp, L. S., & Mahoney, C. C. (2008). Cognitive effects of racial diversity: White individuals’ information processing

in heterogeneous groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,44, 1129–1136.

Stangor, C., Lynch, L., Duan, C., & Glass, B. (1992). Categorization of individuals on the basis of multiple social features. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology,62, 207–218.

Stryker, S. (1968). Identity salience and role performance: The relevance of symbolic interaction theory for family research. Journal of

Marriage and the Family,30, 558–564.

Stryker, S., & Serpe, R. T. (1982). Commitment, identity salience, and role behavior: Theory and research. In W. Ickes, & E. Knowles

(Eds.), Personality, roles, and social behavior (pp. 199–218). New York: Springer.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Polzer, J. T., Seyle, D. C., & Ko, S. J. (2004). Finding value in diversity: Veriﬁcation of personal and social self-views

in diverse groups. Academy of Management Review,29, 9–27.

Tadmore, C. T., & Tetlock, P. E. (2006). Biculturalism: A model of the effects of second-culture exposure on acculturation and

integrative complexity. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,37, 173–190.

Tajfel, H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behavior. Social Science Information,14, 65–93.

Taylor, S. E., Fiske, S. T., Etcoff, N., & Ruderman, A. (1978). The categorical and contextual bases of person memory and stereotyping.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,36, 778–793.

Thatcher, S. M. B., Jehn, K. A., & Zanutto, E. (2003). Cracks in diversity research: The effects of diversity faultlines on conﬂict and

performance. Group Decision and Negotiation,12, 217–241.

Townsend, S. S. M., Markus, H. R., & Bergsieker, H. B. (2009). My choice, your categories: The denial of multiracial identities. Journal

of Social Issues,65, 185–204.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Identity complexity 15

Travassos, C., & Williams, D. R. (2004). The concept and measurement of race and their relationship to public health: A review focused

on Brazil and the United States. Cadernos de Sau

´de Pu

´blica,20, 660–678.

Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group. Oxford, UK:

Blackwell.

Turner, J. C., Oakes, P. J., Haslam, S. A., & McGarty, C. (1994). Self and collective: Cognition and social context. Personality and Social

Psychology Bulletin,20, 454–463.

Urban, L. M., & Miller, N. M. (1998). A meta-analysis of crossed categorization effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

74, 894–908.

van Dick, R., van Knippenberg, D., Ha

¨gele, S., Guillaume, Y. R. F., & Brodbeck, F. C. (2008). Group diversity and group identiﬁcation:

The moderating role of diversity beliefs. Human Relations,61, 1463–1492.

van Knippenberg, D., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Homan, A. C. (2004). Work group diversity and group performance: An integrative model

and research agenda. Journal of Applied Psychology,89, 1008–1022.

van Rijswijk, W., & Ellemers, N. (2002). Context effects on the application of stereotype content to multiple categorizable targets.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,28, 90–101.

Wegener, I., & Klauer, K. C. (2004). Inter-category versus intra-category ﬁt: When social categories match social context. European

Journal of Social Psychology,34, 567–593.

Wenzel, M., Mummendey, A., & Waldzus, S. (2007). Superordinate identities and intergroup conﬂict: The ingroup projection model.

European Review of Social Psychology,18, 331–372.

Williams, K. Y., & O’Reilly, C. A. (1998). Demography and diversity in organizations: A review of 40 years of research. In B. M. Staw,

& L. L. Cummings (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 20, pp. 77–140). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Wittenbrink, B., Judd, C. M., & Park, B. (2001). Spontaneous prejudice in context: Variability in automatically activated attitudes.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,81, 815–827.

Zellmer-Bruhn, M. E., Maloney, M. M., Bhappu, A. D., & Salvador, R. (2008). When and how do differences matter? An exploration of

perceived similarity in teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,107, 41–59.

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

16 Galen V. Bodenhausen

Students navigating the paradoxical loop of essentialism: Language ideologies in internationalizing higher education

Thesis

Full-text available

Aug 2024

Mai Shirahata

This dissertation enhances our understanding of possible social meanings of language ideologies for students in internationalizing and Englishizing higher education, taking Finnish higher education as a case. I approach the social dimension of language ideology concerning students from an intercultural communication perspective. The dissertation comprises three empirical articles. I explored language ideologies in discourse about language and students at different levels: university language policies (macro-level discourse) in the first article, identity construction and negotiation among students as language speakers (micro-level discourse) in the second article, and a student organization’s social media communication practices (meso-level discourse) in the third article. The guiding methodology for the three articles is critical discursive psychology (CDP). CDP’s combination of critical and ethnomethodological approaches to discourse analysis with a focus on the dilemmatic nature of discourse enabled a critical yet situated communication analysis through the lens of language ideology. As a whole, this dissertation addresses the interconnectedness between macro-, meso-, and micro-level discursive processes of intergroup relations or interpersonal relationships among students. The findings indicate that different language ideologies prevalent on international campuses may act as discursive resources to momentarily construct different inclusive, exclusive, and hierarchical relationships among students. In the context of internationalizing higher education of the 2020s, students may be navigating the paradoxical loop of essentialism. Students may inevitably essentialize themselves and be essentialized by others as members of specific national or ethnic groups to highlight their internationality. Yet, they may also liberate themselves from such essentialism by flexibly negotiating different perspectives on language and people. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-86-0242-2

Inducing perceived group variability triggers the incorporation of counter-stereotypic information into a generalized stereotype change

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2024

Perceived variability is the extent to which individuals perceive group members as being similar to one another. Previous research has focused on how: group variability is perceived (and measured); information indicative of group heterogeneity can lead to reductions in stereotypicality; or how stereotype-inconsistent information can result into increased perceived variability. The present combines the three lines of research into a single research venue. In previous studies the stereotypicality of a group representation was influenced by priming stereotype-unrelated traits in an unrelated-context, prior to stereotype measurement; but priming counter-stereotypic traits had no effect on stereotypicality, although it boosted perceptions of group's variability. The present study examines whether highlighting dissimilarities among members of the same professional groups results in subsequent changes in the reported stereotype for a, not yet mentioned, group. The more the dissimilarity among group members, the more likely individuals were to incorporate counter-stereotypic information into the targeted-group, described as less stereotypic, even in central tendency measures. Importantly, the generating mechanism may involve a modification of participants' overall perception of variability. When members within professional groups are perceived as dissimilar, the well-known resistance of stereotypes to counter-stereotypic information is lessened making the group representations more flexible and less biased.

Processus sociocognitifs impliqués dans l’invisibilité intersectionnelle : le rôle de l’incongruence perçue entre les identités

Thesis

Full-text available

Jun 2024

Béatrice Sternberg

This research aimed to examine when and how individuals belonging to multiple stigmatized groups are likely to experience a specific form of discrimination, known as intersectional invisibility. After a systematic literature review (Chapter 2), we tested the role of a plausible yet under-researched moderator: the perceived incongruence between targets’ identities. By taking the example of North African gay men in France, we argued that individuals belonging to multiple stigmatized groups are more likely to experience invisibility when their identities are perceived as incongruent with each other. In two sets of empirical studies, we investigated how this invisibility could both constitute a “disadvantage” in terms of memory processes and a relative “advantage” regarding intergroup biases. When their identities were perceived as incongruent with each other, North African gay men’s spoken statements were less well remembered than those of other targets, this being possibly explained by a hypervisibility of their identities, to the detriment of the memorization of their spoken statements (Chapter 3). However, they were evaluated as less threatening than North African straight men, in part because they were perceived as less typical exemplars of the North African group (Chapter 4). Overall, these results confirm the thesis that perceived incongruence between identities plays a role in the invisibility of individuals belonging to multiple stigmatized groups.

HOW TO ACHIEVE INTEGRATED EDUCATION IN THE REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA? Working Papers

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2016

About model of integrated education in North Macedonia

Game-making and conflicts in collaborative learning settings: a synthesis

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

The lack of social interaction within collaborative learning settings needs to be discussed. This paper aims to pay attention to the dynamics of social relations among learning actors (i.e., student, teacher, and object) during collaborative learning. We discussed the sources of conflicts that can lead to disconnectedness and game-making as a strategy that can foster connectedness. We presented a series of phases with planning, making, and revising in a collaborative learning setting drawing insights from (a) relatedness of self-determination theory, (b) interactions among students, between students and teachers, and between students and learning environments, viewed through the lens of interobjectivity, and (c) the aspect of object-to-think-with from constructionism. Within this context, we discussed the teacher connection for the synthesized phases through the technology-enhanced student-centered learning approach. We concluded that by changing the structure of learning environments to an innovative, technology-enhanced student-centered, and interobjective approach, like game-making, students can be supported in interacting in new ways that promote connected collaboration. We also provided recommendations for teacher professional development and preservice teacher education, while acknowledging the limitations.

The role of agency and communion in humanness conceptualization- a multi-measure and method approach

Article

Sep 2023

Among the main factors considered as predictors of humanness attribution were agency and communion. Agency constitutes an ability to affect one's own situation and communion an ability to form meaningful relationships with others. Seen as a cross-culturally universal framework for how people construe the world, these dimensions have been theorized to be pivotal for seeing others as humans and accordingly as less than humans. However, research testing the predictive power of agency and communion (or more fine-grained distinction of sociability and morality) for humanness ratings is showing a complex picture. Part of this complexity can be attributed to non-independence of measures used in previous research, as some traits pertaining to agency and communion were also used in measuring humanness perception, thus posing a risk of multicollinearity. Furthermore, the strength of the relationship of agency and communion with humanness conceptualizations was never tested, thus not allowing to compare which (if any) predictor is stronger. To address these limitations, we asked participants to rate our focal variables both at trait and group levels (4 studies; Ntot = 2565) in which we test the association of agency, communion (as well as morality and sociability), and different humanness measures. Across all studies, we also tested the strength of the relationship of agency and communion with humanness conceptualizations finding a stable and equal in strength relationship of agency and communion with humanness attribution.

Reframing Aging: Foregrounding Familial and Occupational Roles of Older Adults is Linked to Decreased Ageism Over Two Centuries

Article

Aug 2023
J Aging Soc Pol

As older individuals play instrumental roles in supporting their families and contributing to their workplaces, it is essential to understand how society perceives them in relation to these social roles. This study compares age-based (e.g. senior citizen), familial role-based (e.g. grandmother) and occupational role-based framing (e.g. old(er) doctor) of older adults over 210 years in the United States, and explores the sentiments and narratives associated with each type of framing. We created the largest historical corpus of American English - a 600-million-word-dataset comprising over 150,000 texts and spanning 210 years (1810-2019). Top descriptors (N = 135,659) of nouns related to age (e.g. senior citizen), familial roles (e.g. grandmother) and occupational roles (e.g. old(er) doctor) were compiled and rated for valence (negative-positive) on a 5-point scale. Age-based framing was associated with the most negative portrayals of older adults, specifically a 16% decline over 210 years. Foregrounding their familial roles buffered this negativity and resulted in a 4% decline. Occupational roles were associated with the most positive portrayals of older adults, increasing by 2% over the same period. Our findings underscore the need for society to unlearn any false and harmful beliefs surrounding older adults' abilities and contributions. We propose a strategy to reframe aging by de-emphasizing age and adopting a role-centric approach.

Identity in and of Organizations: Docents’ Guide Through the Academy of Management Journals

Article

May 2024

International Sustainable Competitiveness Advantage Multiracial (Subrace Austronesian and Melanesian) Student Perception towards Diversity in Indonesia

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Dec 2020

In recent times, as the number of growth and mobility in the economic sector is rising in Indonesia, the demands for equal and higher quality human resources are also increasing along the way. According to IPM (Indeks Pembangunan Manusia) in 2018, the gap between the east island province and the west island province score is widening. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Education has tried to cut the hole by providing better qualities and equal opportunities in the educational sector since 2012 by launching a scholarship program for East Island Province and many 3T students. Hence, this study's goals are to better understand the ADik Scholarship program's whole phenomenon and racial injustice, particularly within the community awardees in some regions of Indonesia. This research uses qualitative methods while using many techniques to collect the data and MAXQDA Pro-2020 as software to analyze the data's results. Participants in this study were selected through purposive sampling. The development of the research was a model of factors that influenced the students' performance.

Discrimination and Racial Micro-aggression as a form of Racism in Indonesian Higher Education. Racial Micro-aggression dan Diskriminasi sebagai bentuk dari Rasisme

Preprint

Nov 2023

Rahma Fahira

The major objective of this study was to investigate discrimination and racial micro-aggression (a form of racism) experienced by the student minority community in an Indonesian higher education environment. The data was gathered for this study using a variety of methods, including in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 24 participants from two sub-racial upbringings—Austronesian and Melanesian—classified as multiracial students. The study took place in the city of Purwokerto, and on the other hand, MAXQDA Pro 2020 was used in the study for data coding and result visualization. The outcome reveals the types of racial micro-aggressions faced daily and the stage of racism found during the study.

Stereotype Activation and Inhibition

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 1998

We develop a model of stereotyping that considers both facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms underlying the activation and application of stereotypic beliefs in social perception. We first briefly introduce the two main overarching themes that comprise the major emphases of the model we are proposing. Then we introduce the key elements of the model, drawing upon a number of existing theories of social perception. The bulk of the chapter is then spent developing the application of these integrating themes to an understanding of stereotyping and its avoidance. In doing so, we endeavor to show how general-purpose mechanisms can produce domain-specific insights, thereby advancing our understanding of the particular dynamics of stereotyping while simultaneously contributing to the development of theoretical coherence across psychological domains.

Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds

Book

Full-text available

Jan 1998

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them. Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood. After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking. Bradford Books imprint

Spontaneous Prejudice in Context: Variability in Automatically Activated Attitudes

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2001

The goal of the research reported in this article was to examine whether automatic group attitudes and stereotypes, commonly thought to be fixed responses to a social category cue, are sensitive to changes in the situational context. Two experiments demonstrated such variability of automatic responses due to changes in the stimulus context. In Study 1 White participants’ implicit attitudes toward Blacks varied as a result of exposure to either a positive (a family barbecue) or a negative (a gang incident) stereotypic situation. Study 2 demonstrated similar context effects under clearly automatic processing conditions. Here, the use of different background pictures (church interior vs. street corner) for Black and White face primes affected participants’ racial attitudes as measured by a sequential priming task. Implications for the concept of automaticity in social cognition are discussed.

Psychological essentialism

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1989

Social Identity Theory and the Organization

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1989

Commitment, Identity Salience, and Role Behavior: Theory and Research Example

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 1982

The generic, indeed the defining, task of social psychology is to investigate the interrelationships among society, the social person, and social behavior. Every theoretical perspective or framework in social psychology approaches this immense task by narrowing it, by selecting particular dimensions of society, persons, and behavior as especially worthy of attention. While the ultimate goal for social psychology may be a single, unified theoretical framework sufficiently comprehensive to incorporate “all” the “important” aspects, etc., of the defining conceptual variables of social psychology,1 that goal is not in sight. In the meantime, and before the millenium, all social psychological perspectives or frameworks are partial, selective in their approaches to the world they hope to explicate. That assertion is true of symbolic interactionism, the theoretical framework out of which the theory examined in this chapter develops, although perhaps less so than for most contemporary frameworks in social psychology.

Comments on Part I: Psychological essentialism

Chapter

Jul 1989

Similarity and analogy are fundamental in human cognition. They are crucial for recognition and classification, and have been associated with scientific discovery and creativity. Successful learning is generally less dependent on the memorization of isolated facts and abstract rules than it is on the ability to identify relevant bodies of knowledge already stored as the starting point for new learning. Similarity and analogy play an important role in this process - a role that in recent years has received much attention from cognitive scientists. Any adequate understanding of similarity and analogy requires the integration of theory and data from diverse domains. This interdisciplinary volume explores current developments in research and theory from psychological, computational, and educational perspectives, and considers their implications for learning and instruction. Well-known cognitive scientists examine the psychological processes involved in reasoning by similarity and analogy, the computational problems encountered in simulating analogical processing in problem solving, and the conditions promoting the application of analogical reasoning in everyday situations.

Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes

Article

Jan 2006

Increasing innovation through identity integration

Article

Aug 2007

Innovation involves bridging existing knowledge systems from different areas. We propose that individuals who can integrate multiple social identities are better at combining knowledge systems associated with each identity, and thus exhibit higher levels of innovation. Three studies, each probing different types of social identities, provide evidence for this proposition. A laboratory experiment showed that Asian American biculturals who perceived their multiple cultural identities as compatible (high Identity Integration or high II) exhibited higher levels of innovation in creating new Asian-American recipes than biculturals who perceived their multiple cultural identities as conflicting (low Identity Integration or low II). A field study of faculty members with two disciplinary affiliations found that those who have high II (i.e., perceived the two disciplines as compatible) had more publications than those with low II. A third study showed that women engineers who have high II (i.e., perceived their gender and professional identities as compatible) were more innovative than those with low II. These findings suggest that the psychological management of multiple identities affects how individuals innovate.

Finding Value in Diversity: Verification of Personal and Social Self-Views in Diverse Groups

Article

Jan 2004

We propose a model of group processes that accords a key role to the verification of people's self-views (thoughts and feelings about the self). This approach partially incorporates past work on self-categorization (under the rubric of verification of social self-views) and introduces a new set of processes (the verification of personal self-views) to the groups literature. Conceptual analysis and recent empirical evidence suggest the self-verification framework offers a novel perspective on finding value in diversity.

Diversity in the Person, Diversity in the Group: Challenges of Identity Complexity for Social Perception and Social Interaction

Abstract

Recommended publications

Similarity and Social Interaction: When Similarity Fosters Implicit Behavior Toward a Stranger

Social Perception

On the Perception of Social Consensus

Consequences of schemata for attention, impressions, and recall in complex social interactions