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Why Did They “Choose” to Stay? Perspectives of Hurricane Katrina Observers and Survivors
Abstract
Models of agency--powerful implicit assumptions about what constitutes normatively "good" action--shaped how observers and survivors made meaning after Hurricane Katrina. In Study 1, we analyzed how 461 observers perceived survivors who evacuated (leavers) or stayed (stayers) in New Orleans. Observers described leavers positively (as agentic, independent, and in control) and stayers negatively (as passive and lacking agency). Observers' perceptions reflected the disjoint model of agency, which is prevalent in middle-class White contexts and defines "good" actions as those that emanate from within the individual and proactively influence the environment. In Study 2, we examined interviews with 79 survivors and found that leavers and stayers relied on divergent models of agency. Leavers emphasized independence, choice, and control, whereas stayers emphasized interdependence, strength, and faith. Although both leavers and stayers exercised agency, observers failed to recognize stayers' agency and derogated them because observers assumed that being independent and in control was the only way to be agentic.
... For example, those from low CSES backgrounds exhibit personal agency by actively adapting to their environment and aligning themselves with it. Interviews with Hurricane Katrina survivors revealed that those who evacuated before the storm were more likely to be middleclass, exercising independence and self-control by choosing to leave, whereas those who stayed were more likely to be workingclass, expecting to display resilience and strength in facing challenges rather than give up (Stephens et al., 2009). This also explains why lower CSES consumers are more likely to show patience for their initial choices when consumption options are limited (Thompson et al., 2020). ...
... control (Thompson et al., 2020). Conversely, individuals with high CSES, who have more resources to manage stressful events, are more likely to view personal agency in terms of autonomy and making proactive choices (Markus and Conner, 2013;Stephens et al., 2009), i.e., they tend to demonstrate internal demand and exert control by aligning the environment with their desires (Stephens et al., 2009). Additionally, Kusserow's (1999) study shows that high SES (upper-middle-class) parents respect their children's emotions and desires, enabling them to find the right social path for themselves (i.e., developing primary control). ...
... control (Thompson et al., 2020). Conversely, individuals with high CSES, who have more resources to manage stressful events, are more likely to view personal agency in terms of autonomy and making proactive choices (Markus and Conner, 2013;Stephens et al., 2009), i.e., they tend to demonstrate internal demand and exert control by aligning the environment with their desires (Stephens et al., 2009). Additionally, Kusserow's (1999) study shows that high SES (upper-middle-class) parents respect their children's emotions and desires, enabling them to find the right social path for themselves (i.e., developing primary control). ...
Introduction
Consumers routinely confront goal conflicts, navigating the tension between persevering in goal pursuit and succumbing to the temptation of indulgent purchases. While prior literatures have endeavored to explore diverse factors influencing indulgent consumption, they have largely overlooked the longitudinal lens of consumer development to uncover deeper, underlying causes. Childhood socioeconomic background has been established as a critical factor influencing various behaviors both in early life and adulthood. This study aims to explore the impact of childhood socioeconomic status on indulgent consumption in adulthood, and to examine the mediating role of pleasure pursuit in this relationship, as well as the moderating effect of individuals' sense of worthiness.
Methods
Across four behavioral experiments, spanning three domains of indulgence-related decisions and relying on different methods of childhood socioeconomic status measurement, this study sheds light on how consumers of different childhood socioeconomic status to choose when facing a conflict decision (self-control vs. indulgence). A total of 627 participants from China (66.19% female, Mage = 30.46) were recruited through the Credamo platform for this study, and SPSS analytical software was utilized to conduct comprehensive analyses on the relevant data, encompassing primary effect analysis, mediation analysis, and moderated mediation analysis.
Results
The study corroborates that individuals with high childhood socioeconomic status are more likely to choose indulgence compared to those with low childhood socioeconomic status (β = 0.24, p < 0.05). This effect is found to be independent of people's current level of socioeconomic status (p > 0.05), which is mediated by differences in pleasure pursuit [β = 0.1026, 95% CI= (0.0312, 0.1688)]. In other words, individuals who grew up wealthy are generally more likely to pursue pleasure (novel experiences and potential rewards) from decision-making, thus increasing their choice of indulgences. Furthermore, the strength of this effect is moderated by individuals' sense of worthiness (β = 0.15, p < 0.05). Lastly, sense of control has been disqualified as a plausible psychological mechanism underlying this phenomenon [95% CI= (−0.035, 0.021)].
Discussion
This study demonstrates that childhood socioeconomic status has a significant positive impact on indulgent consumption in adulthood. The underlying psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions of this influence were also examined. The findings offer a novel theoretical perspective on the antecedents of indulgent consumption and provide valuable insights for businesses in developing targeted marketing strategies and enhancing consumer wellbeing.
... Childhood SES relates to whether the environment in which an individual grew up had plenty or scarce resources [11,40]. Early life experiences which are reflected in childhood SES can be important in determining individuals' values and responses to threats [6,7,41]. Previous research, however, seems to make equivocal predictions about the possible role of childhood SES in individuals' propensity to stockpile during threatening events such as a global pandemic. ...
... On the other hand, another stream of research suggests that individuals who grew up in a low SES environment tend to be more patient and adapt to their environment to cope with threatening circumstances [10,11,[41][42][43]. For example, when faced with product unavailability, low childhood SES individuals were more likely to attribute less value to an unavailable alternative and were more patiently waiting for the currently unavailable option than high childhood SES individuals [11,43]. ...
... For example, when faced with product unavailability, low childhood SES individuals were more likely to attribute less value to an unavailable alternative and were more patiently waiting for the currently unavailable option than high childhood SES individuals [11,43]. Similarly, during a natural disaster--hurricane Katrina-individuals from low SES childhoods were more likely to re-confirm religious values and stress the importance of helping each other to alleviate anxiety rather than trying to actively change their personal circumstances by leaving the hurricane zone, like high childhood SES individuals did [32,41]. This suggests that individuals from low SES childhoods might be less likely to stockpile during the COVID-19 pandemic than individuals from high SES childhoods when anticipating product scarcity. ...
Previous research has shown that perceived existential threat experienced during or shortly after the first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, engendered anticipated scarcity and stockpiling behavior. However, the relationship between anticipated scarcity and stockpiling may not hold unambiguously for everyone. Across two studies and one preregistered replication (N = 644), we show that perceived threat of COVID-19 is associated with stockpiling tendencies by increasing the anticipation of product scarcity–a resource threat. The association between anticipated product scarcity and stockpiling depends, however, on childhood socio-economic status (SES) and materialism. For individuals with low childhood SES, the anticipation of product scarcity was only associated with stockpiling among those who valued materialism. Individuals with high childhood SES, by contrast, stockpiled in response to anticipated scarcity regardless of their level of materialism. Our findings qualify previous literature on the association between perceived threat of COVID-19, anticipated scarcity and stockpiling during the COVID-19 pandemic and help reconcile contradictory predictions about the role of childhood SES in individuals’ consumption behavior in response to adversity.
... Situations of threat strengthen the differences in the mode of agency between individuals in higher vs. lower socioeconomic status positions (Galinsky et al. 2003;Stephens et al. 2009;Griskevicius et al. 2011;Smith et al. 2012;Mittal and Griskevicius 2014). For instance, individuals from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds activate smaller and more constrained networks when facing a job loss threat (Smith et al. 2012). ...
... For instance, individuals from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds activate smaller and more constrained networks when facing a job loss threat (Smith et al. 2012). Stephens et al. (2009) studied business owners categorized as leavers or stayers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. While the leavers were predominantly middle status, with higher incomes, more extensive social networks, and better education, the stayers were mostly low status with contrasting characteristics. ...
... While the leavers were predominantly middle status, with higher incomes, more extensive social networks, and better education, the stayers were mostly low status with contrasting characteristics. Nevertheless, stayers described themselves as interdependent, caring for others, and strong together (Stephens et al. 2009). ...
... Situations of threat strengthen the differences in the mode of agency between individuals in higher vs. lower socioeconomic status positions (Galinsky et al. 2003;Stephens et al. 2009;Griskevicius et al. 2011;Smith et al. 2012;Mittal and Griskevicius 2014). For instance, individuals from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds activate smaller and more constrained networks when facing a job loss threat (Smith et al. 2012). ...
... For instance, individuals from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds activate smaller and more constrained networks when facing a job loss threat (Smith et al. 2012). Stephens et al. (2009) studied business owners categorized as leavers or stayers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. While the leavers were predominantly middle status, with higher incomes, more extensive social networks, and better education, the stayers were mostly low status with contrasting characteristics. ...
... While the leavers were predominantly middle status, with higher incomes, more extensive social networks, and better education, the stayers were mostly low status with contrasting characteristics. Nevertheless, stayers described themselves as interdependent, caring for others, and strong together (Stephens et al. 2009). ...
Networks play a vital role for entrepreneurs in overcoming crises. The most vulnerable to crises are those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. However, we know less about the role of socioeconomic status in entrepreneurial networking. This study investigates whom entrepreneurs call in case of emergency. We develop hypotheses on how entrepreneurs’ socioeconomic status influences models of networking agency in situations of economic threat. The results of a pre-registered randomized experiment in the COVID-19 context conducted with 122 entrepreneurs from the US indicate that entrepreneurs in higher socioeconomic status positions activate contacts to serve their own goals (i.e., independent networking agency) when facing an economic threat. In contrast, and counter-intuitively, entrepreneurs of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to support others when facing an economic threat (i.e., interdependent networking agency). Exploring the evolving network structure, our explorative post-hoc analyses suggest that entrepreneurs activate closer networks (i.e., higher density and stronger ties) under threat. The study discusses the implications of these findings for the theory of entrepreneurial networking in general and network responses to crises in particular.
... Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, and Eloul (2009) sought to theorize why people do or do not evacuate based on the socio-economic backgrounds of people affected by Hurricane Katrina. This research found that the majority of people who evacuated during Hurricane Katrina were white, middle class families, while those who stayed were mostly poorer with African-American backgrounds (Stephens et al., 2009). Further, Stephens et al., (2004) found that among people who stayed, justifications, such as 'we thought the storm was not going to come/not be as strong,' 'we have a good community,' and 'this will make me stronger,' were common. ...
... Social meaning is often characterized by worry, dread, and anxiety, while still others view it as the cultural interpretation of what is dangerous (Dash & Gladwin, 2007;Perry et al., 1982;Sorensen & Sorensen, 2007;Stephens et al., 2009;Vigsø & Odén, 2016). Sorensen and Sorensen (2007) point to several key variables and thought processes that determine risk perception, including how experience affects evacuation decisions; depersonalization and denial of risk; impact of preparedness effort; and the relationship between culture, ethnicity, vulnerability, and evacuation. ...
During crisis events, emergency responders must verify the particulars of an event before sending out warning messages. The gap between an event's occurrence and official notification is often used by those impacted by that event to verify what is happening before taking action. The addition of information communication technologies has had an impact on what we term the verification pause. This pause is the amount of time it takes to verify what has happened before messages are received and before reaction can begin. More than milling about post notification, this understudied period of time is rarely visible for researchers. The present case study contains an analysis of a verification pause between an earthquake event and the actions taken by students in a classroom in a large university in the United States. The students in the classroom felt the earthquake and immediately began to search for verification that what they felt was indeed an earthquake. The authors conclude with a discussion of the utility of case studies and call for more focused analysis of the similarities between cases.
... The many subtle and interrelated differences between people in North American and those in Japanese cultural contexts in both the content and the scope of their considerations when acting reflect divergent models of agency-implicit normative understandings of if, when and how to act Markus et al., 2006;Stephens et al., 2009;Markus, 2016). In Japan (as in many contexts outside North America) the undergirding model of agency is one that assumes interdependence among people and that being is always experienced as in relation to some others. ...
... This work contributes to a growing understanding that there are multiple forms of agency (e.g., Markus and Kitayama, 2003;Kitayama et al., 2006;Stephens et al., 2009;Markus, 2016). With the independent model of agency, the focus of questions about if, when, and how to act is relatively concentrated on the selfone's intention to help, the belief that one wants to or can help. ...
Japanese rank among the least likely to intervene to help a stranger in a non-emergency situation while Americans rank among the most likely. Across four studies, we demonstrate that Japanese are less likely to offer help to strangers because their decisions rely more heavily on the assessment of the needs of others. Accordingly, when there is uncertainty about the need for help, Japanese are less likely to intervene than Americans because without an understanding of the needs of recipient, the impact of intervention may also be harmful. When the situation is unambiguous, Japanese and Americans are equally likely to help. This divergence in readiness to help strangers elaborates the understanding of why people in Japanese contexts are more likely than those in United States contexts to attend to the situation and to avoid uncertain situations. It also illuminates cultural differences in models of agency—implicit understandings of when and why a person should act to aid another.
... In contrast, an interdependent model of the self assumes that individuals should adjust to the conditions of a situation, be connected to others, and respond to the needs, preferences, and interests of the community. A case study including interviews with survivors from Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans, USA, 2005) demonstrated the relevance of different self-models in disaster contexts (Stephens et al., 2009). The authors observed that independent self-models prevailed among a group of interviewees of mainly middle-class survivors who evacuated before the Hurricane's arrival. ...
... The present research investigates instructional communication in relation to evacuation and analyse the nature of the instructions provided by authorities in terms of suggested social (interdependent) and individual (independent) behaviours in such phases. Despite some previous work having emphasised the role of independent and interdependent self-construal to explain peoples' responses to disaster (Stephens et al., 2009;Sun et al., 2013), to the best of our knowledge, no systematic analysis has yet examined the framing of evacuation order with regard to different operationalisations of the self. The present research addresses this important limitation by analysing the content of a large set of available disaster instructions. ...
In disaster evacuation, the most reasonable reaction is seen as to evacuate through independence. On the contrary, people often stay and behave socially interdependent, hence stressing the gap between evacuation instructions and actual people’s behaviour.
The present research analyses the content of a set of behavioural instructions and provides an overview of common framing of evacuation communication. That is informed by psychological models that explain behaviour based distinguish between the independent self (i.e., everyone for themselves) and interdependent self (i.e., all together).
Results of this paper highlight that, despite the prevalence of interdependent behaviour, most of the instructions focuses on the independent behaviours rather than on interdependent instructions that don’t reflect actual people’s behaviour in case of evacuation. The objective of this paper is to increase authorities’ awareness on the relation between existing instructions (independent) and actual behaviour (interdependent); the final aim is to help authorities to design and create better instructional communication campaign for disaster evacuation.
... For example, interviews with survivors of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 who left the area before the storm, who tended to have higher SES, emphasized the degree to which they had exercised independence and control by choosing to leave. In contrast, those who stayed in New Orleans during the storm, who tended to have lower SES, emphasized exerting strength in the face of a challenge and not giving up (Stephens et al. 2009). We may observe similar differences in consumers' reactions to scarcity during the COVID-19 crisis. ...
... Finally, should governments tailor their messages to the levels of chronic scarcity experienced by their constituents? Responses to evacuation messages during Hurricane Katrina differed by SES (Stephens et al. 2009); responses to stay-at-home orders during COVID-19 may be similarly shaped by SES. Research suggests that messages focusing on benefits for others (oneself) and of adapting to (influencing) the environment during the COVID-19 crisis should resonate more with low-(high-) SES constituents (Markus and Conner 2013). ...
... If a culture exhibits a pattern of behavior, it is presumed that the people of that culture hold beliefs, values, and attitudes conducive to that behavior (and vice versa). Thus, if a culture is religious or works hard or is future-minded, it is because the people of a culture "want" it to be that way (McClelland, 1961;Savani & Rattan, 2012;Savani et al., 2011;Stephens et al., 2009). ...
Psychologists often posit relatively straightforward attitude-behavior links. They also often study cultural arrangements as manifestations of attitudes and values writ large. However, we illustrate some difficulties with scaling up attitude-behavior principles from the individual-level to the cultural-level: Historical attitudes and values can lead to the creation of intermediating institutions, whose value-expressive functions may be at odds with the behavioral outcomes they produce. Through “institutional inversion,” institutions may facilitate rather than inhibit stigmatized behavior. Here we examine attitudes and behavior related to
debt, contrast historically Protestant versus Catholic places, and show how cultural attitudes against debt may lead to the creation of institutions that increase—rather than decrease—borrowing. Historical anti-debt attitudes in Protestant places have led to contemporary households in Protestant cultures now carrying the highest debt loads. We discuss the importance of supply side factors, attitude --> institutions --> behavior causal chains, and some blind spots that lead to unintended consequences.
... As Nicole Stephens, Hazel Markus, and Taylor Phillips suggest (2014), social class and other forms of segregation produce differences in material and social conditions that promote different ways of conceiving the self and relating to others. For example, in lower social class environments, the self is assumed to be interdependent with others (Stephens et al. 2009;Stephens, Markus, and Townsend 2007). In contrast, the environments of higher social class people promote independence, personal freedom, and choice. ...
... In contrast, in rural, low-income contexts where the majority of the global population lives, people belong to tight knit, enduring webs of social connection, mutual support, and obligation that can help individuals cope with resource scarcity and risk as well as provide them with valuable information and opportunities. In such contexts, an interdependent model of agency-grounded in responsiveness to social norms, roles, and obligations; coordination with others; and the advancement of relational goals-predominates (Adams et al., 2012;Gelfand et al., 2011;Huis et al., 2017;Markus & Kitayama, 2003;Stephens et al., 2009). There, people's opportunity to achieve their goals often depends on the support of others, on the availability of many hands to help lift their hut. ...
Poverty is multidimensional, associated not only with a
lack of financial resources, but also often social-psychological constraints, such as diminished agency and aspirations.
Through a series of field experiments, this paper assesses the
causal impacts of culturally wise interventions designed to
build women’s agency on poverty reduction efforts in rural
Niger. Moreover, the study identifies a model of agency
that is “culturally wise” because it is the most motivational
and functional in the study cultural context. Study 1
reports descriptive evidence that an interdependent model
of agency—that is grounded in social harmony, respect,
and collective advancement and that accounts for relational affordances for individual goals—is predominant
in rural Niger. This stands in contrast to a more self-oriented, independent model grounded in personal aspirations,
self-direction, and self-advancement that is more common
in the West. Study 2 explores the psychosocial mechanisms
of a highly effective, multifaceted poverty reduction program that included two psychosocial interventions—a community sensitization and a life skills training, which incorporated both models of agency. Although the results support the role of intrapersonal processes (including enhanced self-efficacy and optimistic future expectations) in driving economic impacts, there is equal, if not greater, support for relational processes (including increased subjective
social standing, control over earnings, and social support).
Study 3 conducts a mechanism experiment to disentangle
the causal effects of interventions grounded in independent agency (“personal initiative”) or interdependent agency (“interpersonal initiative”). The results show that the interdependent agency intervention, which is considered to be most “culturally wise,” led to significant effects on economic outcomes as well as both intrapersonal and relational processes. By contrast, the independent agency intervention showed impacts on intrapersonal processes alone. These findings show the promise of an emerging area of research at the intersection of behavioral science, cultural psychology, and development economics for addressing complex global problems like poverty and inequality.
... We observed a situation where behaviors could be labeled and categorized collectively (Berger & Luckmann, 1966;Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), where similarities and differences among neighbors became exposed. As a result, organizing, in practical terms, was strengthened by creating new social "boundaries" (Stephens et al., 2009). Such "boundaries" were, needless to say, suggested or enforced by health authorities and governments, revealing once again the importance of widely shared and accepted cues and frames. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily exposed the inadequacy of established institutions and markets to handle a multidimensional crisis, but it also revealed the spontaneous emergence of social collectives to mitigate some of its consequences. Building upon more than 600 responses from an open-ended survey and follow-up qualitative interviews, we seek to understand the spontaneous formation of social collectives in neighborhoods during the initial global lockdown. Applying the sensemaking lens, we theorize the process that prevented the collapse of sensemaking; motivated neighbors to comply with the pandemic-related restrictions; and inspired the development of collective initiatives and the sharing of resources, experiences, and a feeling of belonging. In doing so, we identify mechanisms that allow distributed sensemaking and organizing for resilience: widely shared and accepted cues and frames, simultaneous enactment of practices, embeddedness, visibility of actions, and sense of community. Contrary to the literature on local community organizing and entrepreneurship, which emphasizes the importance of shared values and beliefs, we reveal how the abovementioned mechanisms enable social collectives to emerge and build resilience in times of crisis, even in the absence of pre-existing ties and physical and social isolation. Implications for sensemaking, resilience, organization studies, and community psychology are discussed.
... The cognitive consequences associated with financial scarcity also affect the self. Kraus and colleagues found that people from lower social class contexts present a greater interdependent self (Kraus & Stephens, 2012;Stephens et al., 2009), which in turn facilitates empathic accuracy and prosocial behavior (Piff et al., 2010). In contrast, higher social class individuals prioritize independence and freedom and help others less (see Kraus & Stephens, 2012). ...
In the present research, we examined the links among relative financial scarcity, thinking style, fatalism, and well‐being and their roles in predicting protective behaviors against COVID‐19. Study 1 (N = 120) revealed that after an experimental manipulation to induce the perception of relative financial scarcity (versus financial abundance), people who perceived higher relative financial scarcity changed their thinking style to a more concrete mindset. In Study 2 (N = 873), the relative financial abundance–scarcity situation was measured, and the results showed that the greater the perceived relative financial scarcity was, the more concrete the mindset and the lower the sense of well‐being. Importantly, we found that individuals who felt poorer but maintained an abstract thinking style reported higher well‐being. Study 3 (N = 501) examined the influence of a concrete thinking style in people who perceived that their economic situation had worsened with the pandemic. The results showed that when this vulnerable population presented a more concrete mindset, they reported lower well‐being, higher fatalism, and lower protective behavior against COVID‐19. Thus, maintaining an abstract mindset promotes higher well‐being, lower fatalism, and greater protective behaviors against COVID‐19, even under economic difficulties. Because thinking style can be modified, our results encourage the development of new social intervention programs to promote an abstract mindset when people face important challenges.
... We apply this perspective to the corporate context and suggest that prior social status shapes the attitude of entrepreneurs to strategic innovation choices. The sociology and psychology literature has offered different definitions of social status including income (Martin et al., 2016) and education (Stephens et al., 2009). Some adopt a combination of both to form composite measures (Kish-Gephart and Campbell, 2015). ...
Social status is seen as an important topic in management and organisational sciences. Despite the extensive research on the upper echelons of management, little is known about the influence of social status on R&D investment decisions. We examine the effects of pre-entrepreneurial social status on R&D investments based on imprinting theory, using 2000–2014 data for 20,177 Chinese private small- and medium-sized enterprises. The results reveal that entrepreneurs with an upper and lower social status show a stronger tendency to make R&D investments than middle-class counterparts. The findings are robust to various sensitivity tests. In addition, we explore the moderating influences of political capital and institutional environment, both of which enhance the positive relationship between social status and R&D investments. Our study finds that social status has a lasting and varying impact on decisions to engage in innovation behaviours. The findings contribute to research on Chinese firm innovation and offer key implications for social status and imprinting theorising.
... Barrios 2011; Cupples and Glyn 2014;Davies 2017;Elliott and Pais 2006;Green, Bates, and Smyth 2007;Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018;Peck 2006;Rowe 2014;Stephens et al. 2009;Thiele 2017;Yarnal 2007;Zebrowski and Sage 2017). We mobilise this case because in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the short-term as well as in the long-term, New Orleans was a site where (1) the concept of resilience was particularly invoked(Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018;Rowe 2014;Zebrowski and Sage 2017), and (2) many different types of SIs were launched, with a number of community-based innovation initiatives competing with neoliberal initiatives(Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018;Rowe 2014) and innovative top-down policy moves ...
... To understand structural inequality, children must consider how environmental constraints may have contributed to the outcomes they observe. A fundamental part of this understanding is recognizing that constrained choices-that is, choices made from limited options-are poor indicators of others' desires (Bonilla-Silva, 1997;Hetey & Eberhardt, 2018;Stephens et al., 2009). Indeed, compared to unconstrained actions, constrained actions provide relatively ambiguous evidence for a person's preference, as it is less clear whether the choice was made because of an intrinsic desire for that option or because that was the option more readily available. ...
A fundamental part of understanding structural inequality is recognizing that constrained choices, particularly those that align with societal stereotypes, are poor indicators of a person's desires. This study examined whether children (N = 246 U.S. children, 53% female; 61% White, 24% Latinx; 5–10 years) acknowledge constraints in this way when reasoning about gender‐stereotypical choices, relative to gender‐neutral and gender‐counterstereotypical choices. Results indicated that children more frequently inferred preferences regardless of whether the actor was constrained when reasoning about gender‐stereotypical choices, as compared to gender‐neutral or gender‐counterstereotypical choices. We also found evidence of an age‐related increase in the general tendency to acknowledge constraints. We discuss the broader implications of these results for children's understanding of constraints within society.
... As we suggested earlier, such cases of cultural racism include the imposition of standards for beauty and artistic expression (e.g., art, music, literature, fashion) that denigrate African forms and elevate European forms, even while appropriating African creativity. Such cases of cultural racism also include the imposition of WEIRD ways of being or knowing-including notions of ability (Dirth & Adams, 2019;Oppong, 2020), care (Esiaka & Adams, 2020), empowerment (Kurtiş et al., 2016), love (Osei-Tutu et al., 2021), merit (Croizet, 2011), methodological rigor (Adams & Salter, 2019), rights (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), and choice and responsibility (Stephens et al., 2009)-as just-natural standards. From this perspective, racism is less about differential treatment than it is the "possessive investment" (Lipsitz, 1997) in white ways of being that masquerade as race-neutral standards for universal application. ...
Coloniality represents the contemporary patterns of power and domination that emerged in the late 15th century during the so-called classic era of colonialism. Although much of psychology and psychological thought has adhered to the logic of coloniality, there is also a considerable body of work that has sought to decolonize psychology. It is within this latter tradition of decolonizing psychology—which seems to have gained increasing attention in recent years—that we situate this article and its attempt to articulate a decolonial Africa(n)-centered psychology that addresses itself to antiracism. While we concede that there are myriad ways by which to practice and theorize such a psychology, we focus specifically on collective antiracist struggle and everyday antiracist resistance. We conclude by considering questions of universalism and epistemology as they relate to a decolonial Africa(n)-centered psychology of antiracism.
... While people of color have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic (Millett et al., 2020), potentially reducing the willingness to share face-to-face, the Black Lives Matter movement has given rise to solidarity in communities across the U.S. (Creosote Maps, 2020), potentially enhancing willingness to share within neighborhoods. Prior research on Hurricane Katrina shows higher likelihood among Black respondents to emphasize the importance of connection to and caring for others during an evacuation (Stephens et al., 2009). Indeed, our findings show a positive correlation between identifying as Black and the willingness to share an evacuation ride. ...
Volunteered sharing of resources is often observed in response to disaster events. During evacuations the sharing of resources and vehicles is a crucial mechanism for expanding critical capacity and enabling inclusive disaster response. This paper examines the complexity of rideshare decision-making in the wake of simultaneous emergencies. Specifically, the need for physical distancing measures during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic complicates face-to-face resource sharing between strangers. The ability of on-demand ridesharing to provide emergency transportation to individuals without access to alternatives calls for an understanding of how evacuees weigh risks of contagion against benefits of spontaneous resource sharing. In this research, we examine both sociodemographic and situational factors that contribute to a willingness to share flood evacuation rides with strangers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that the willingness to share is significantly correlated with traditional emergency resource sharing motivations and current COVID-19 risk factors. To test these hypotheses, we distributed an online survey during the pandemic surge in July 2020 to 600 individuals in three midwestern and three southern states in the United States with high risk of flooding. We estimate a random parameter multinomial logit model to determine the willingness to share a ride as a driver or passenger. Our findings show that willingness to share evacuation rides is associated with individual sociodemographics (such as being female, under 36 years old, Black, or republican-identifying) and the social environment (such as households with children, social network proximity, and neighborly sharing attitudes). Moreover, our findings suggest higher levels of income, COVID-19 threat perception, evacuation fear, and household preparedness all correspond with a lower willingness to share rides. We discuss the broader implications of emergency on-demand mobility during concurrent disasters to formulate strategies for transportation agencies and on-demand ridehailing providers.
... Low-SES people have limited resources and cannot afford protections from threats. Thus, low-SES people develop interdependent and connected self-construals, whereas affluence bestows high-SES people with independent and distinctive self-construals [9,[25][26][27]. ...
This research focused on the psychological impact of an epidemic. We conducted a cross-sectional survey and two empirical experiments to examine how an epidemic would influence unethical behaviors and how the effect differs in people of different subjective socioeconomic statuses. These studies consistently demonstrated that subjective socioeconomic status moderates the relationship between an epidemic and unethical behaviors. Specifically, the perceived severity of an epidemic positively predicts the unethical behaviors of people with a high socioeconomic status, but it does not predict the unethical behaviors of people with a low socioeconomic status. These findings elucidate the effects of epidemics and bring theoretical and practical implications.
... According to this model, "actions are freely chosen, contingent on one's own preferences, intentions, [and] motives" (p. 7). Although a highly influential model, it has been seen to be applicable mostly in American culture and less in other cultures (e.g., Ji et al., 2000;Na & Kitayama, 2012;Savani et al., 2008Savani et al., , 2010Stephens et al., 2009). This means the way Americans would perceive and evaluate a situation in the face of existing choices would be different from other cultures where choice is not given such importance. ...
In today’s fast-moving society, we get a multitude of options available. However, choices once considered beneficial, are now being largely debated. In the face of rising prevalence of depression and being identified as the ‘disease of modernity’, this burden of increasing choices on the modern society needs to be re-evaluated. In this paper, we aim to elucidate the rising rate of depression in today’s society with regard to the increasing number of choices, the decision-making process, and the consequent attribution of the decision-making situations. We also attempt to look at the role of culture, acknowledging its importance in depression and perception of choices. Lastly, a theoretical perspective is being outlined about how the increasing amount of choices being provided in today’s society can give rise to a pessimistic attribution style among decision-makers. Decision-makers therein might be more likely to face post-decisional regret and self-blame, ultimately developing risk for depression. The way in which choices are perceived in a particular culture could either facilitate or act as a buffer to depression. Thus, the essential role that culture might play in moderating this relationship is also discussed.
... If a culture exhibits a pattern of behavior, it is presumed that the people of that culture hold beliefs, values, and attitudes conducive to that behavior (and vice versa). Thus, if a culture is religious or works hard or is future-minded, it is because the people of a culture "want" it to be that way (McClelland, 1961;Savani & Rattan, 2012;Savani et al., 2011;Stephens et al., 2009). ...
Psychologists often posit relatively straightforward attitude-behavior links. They also often study cultural arrangements as manifestations of attitudes and values writ large. However, we illustrate some difficulties with scaling up attitude-behavior principles from the individual-level to the cultural-level: Historical attitudes and values can lead to the creation of intermediating institutions, whose value-expressive functions may be at odds with the behavioral outcomes they produce. Through “institutional inversion,” institutions may facilitate rather than inhibit stigmatized behavior. Here we examine attitudes and behavior related to debt, contrast historically Protestant versus Catholic places, and show how cultural attitudes against debt may lead to the creation of institutions that increase—rather than decrease—borrowing. Historical antidebt attitudes in Protestant places have led to contemporary households in Protestant cultures now carrying the highest debt loads. We discuss the importance of supply side factors, attitude → institutions → behavior causal chains, and some blind spots that lead to unintended consequences.
... Recent research suggests that natural disasters and pandemics have shaped human values, norms, and culture (Gelfand et al., 2011;Oishi et al., 2017;Schaller & Murray, 2008;Van de Vliert, 2013). Recent research also shows that natural disasters and pandemics affect racial minority and lower socioeconomic status individuals disproportionately (e.g., Rhodes et al., 2010;Stephens et al., 2009;Yamada, 2009). The present research sought to identify some protective factors against such vulnerability. ...
The present research examined the zip code level (177 zip codes) prevalence of and deaths associated with COVID-19 in New York City as of May 22, 2020. Walkable zip codes had consistently lower prevalence of ( r = −.49) and deaths ( r = −.15) associated with COVID-19. The mediation analysis showed that the degree of reduction in actual geographical mobility during the lockdown (measured by smartphone GIS data) accounted for geographical variations in the number of confirmed cases and deaths. Residents in wealthy zip codes and walkable zip codes were able to limit geographical mobility, whereas residents in poor zip codes and Black and Hispanic dominant zip codes were not. Finally, the spatial lag regression analysis showed that walkability was a robust predictor of zip code–level prevalence of and deaths associated with COVID-19. Overall, walkability seems to have provided protection against the spread of COVID-19.
... The black populations living in poverty were not only likely to have suffered the direct impacts of the hurricane, they were also less likely to have afforded insurances, or possessed the economic and social capital needed to negotiate bureaucracies and more easily recover their lives (Masozera, Bailey, & Kerchner, 2007). While they did exhibit agency, relying on community and God, they were interpreted by observers as lacking independence and control over their fates, a model of agency exhibited and afforded by, particularly, the white middle-classes (Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul, 2009). While the disaster continues to be (re)mediated in the shifting media landscape, in the aftermath the racialized disaster-affected people were framed "blameworthy, irresponsible and failed citizens who pathologically insisted on staying put despite public warnings to evacuate" (Cupples & Glynn, 2014, p. 368). ...
The influence of private actors, such as non-profit organizations (NPOs) and firms, has been increasing in disaster gov-ernance. Previous literature has interrogated the responsibilities of states towards citizens in disasters, but the roles of private actors have been insufficiently challenged. The article politicizes the entangled relations between NPOs, states, and disaster-affected people. It proposes the Rawlsian division of moral labor as a useful, normative framework for interrogating the justice of disaster governance arrangements in which 'liberal' states are involved. Liberal states have two types of responsibilities in disasters: humanitarian and political. The humanitarian responsibilities imply provision of basic resources needed for the capacity to make autonomous choices (domestically and abroad), while the political responsibilities imply provision of the institutions needed for the liberal democratic citizenship (domestically). Through this analytical lens and building on the wealth of existing scholarship, we illustrate the disaster governance role of the American Red Cross in the United States (a 2005 hurricane) and in Haiti (the 2010 earthquake). Where, in Rawlsian terms, United States is interpreted as a 'liberal' society, Haiti is framed as a 'burdened' society. The article proposes five points to consider in analyzing disaster governance arrangements under neoliberal regimes, structured around the division of humanitarian and political responsibilities. The article illustrates how NPOS are instrumental in blurring the boundaries between humanitarian and political responsibilities. This might result ultimately in actual vulnerabilities remaining unaddressed. While the Rawlsian approach challenges the privatization and lack of coordination in disaster governance, it is limited in analyzing the political construction of 'burdened' societies.
... Survey evidence highlights that limited mobility, lack of transportation or shelter access, misinformation about storm severity, and fear of property damage all contribute to low evacuation rates (2,3). Further complicating disaster management, politicization of hurricanes spiked in 2017 when conservative media outlets claimed that hurricane warnings were another example of "fake news." ...
Mistrust of scientific evidence and government-issued guidelines is increasingly correlated with political affiliation. Survey evidence has documented skepticism in a diverse set of issues including climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and, most recently, COVID-19 risks. Less well understood is whether these beliefs alter high-stakes behavior. Combining GPS data for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with 2016 U.S. presidential election precinct-level results, we examine how conservative-media dismissals of hurricane advisories in 2017 influenced evacuation decisions. Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters (34% versus 45%), a gap not present in prior hurricanes. Results are robust to fine-grain geographic controls, which compare likely Clinton and Trump voters living within 150 m of each other. The rapid surge in media-led suspicion of hurricane forecasts-and the resulting divide in self-protective measures-illustrates a large behavioral consequence of science denialism.
... The literature on collective traumas elucidates the mechanism leading to the strengthening of altruistic values and beliefs following a disaster: a stronger collective identity. Collective traumas, especially the ones not caused by human malice, create a common ground that allows all the members of a community to perceive themselves as similar, united by the same suffering and fate, and creates a sense of social cohesion and belonging to society (Alexander et al. 2004, Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2011, Hirschberger 2018, Muldoon 2020, Rao and Greve 2018, Stephens et al. 2009). Even more than for other events that unite a community, such as sports competitions, collective traumas bind the community together in a deeper way due to the death salience provoked by these events and the related quest for meaning (Linley and Joseph 2011, Stephens et al. 2012, Wrzesniewski 2002. ...
... Future experiments should further seek to disentangle the impacts of individual-versus community-focused empowerment in diverse sociocultural contexts. Overall, program designers delivering aid in non-WEIRD, low-income contexts might productively begin with messages focused on interdependent forms of agency (27,52) and then evaluate and iterate on them using local forecasts and other methods as appropriate. ...
Significance
A new era of international development aspires to increase the dignity and capabilities of people in poverty. Yet narratives accompanying aid often reinforce stigmatizing views of those in poverty as deficient in their circumstances or ability. We find that typical deficit-focused narratives risk undermining the very goals of aid—to empower recipients to pursue their goals and experience dignity rather than shame. In contrast, narratives crafted to counter stigma and leverage culturally resonant forms of agency enhance recipients’ beliefs in themselves and investment in their skills, without reducing donor support. As models of agency differ across sociocultural contexts, program designers need tools for identifying effective narratives. We present “local forecasting” as a particularly efficient methodology for this need.
... What's more, populations in which people think of themselves as 'independent persons' could be more likely to downplay the severity of the problem, because they will have greater trouble imagining the threat would actually become dangerous to their loved ones, or affect society as a whole. In societies and populations where a 'conjoint' model of the self is prevalent [21] -people think of themselves as 'member of a group' and as socially interdependent -this could be the other way around: such populations may be likely to promote the emergence of collective norms and stick to them. Unfortunately, in many countries at least -and despite past pandemics such as the Spanish Flu In all likelihood, the mismatch between our misperception of the severity of the threat and its consequences is likely to become even more destructive in dense urban areas in which social isolation is a costly good. ...
Dezecache et al. argue that affiliation and contact-seeking are key responses to danger. These natural social tendencies are likely to hinder the observance of physical distancing during the current pandemic. We need internet access at this time, not only to promote freedom of expression, but also to promote public health.
... Barrios 2011; Cupples and Glyn 2014;Davies 2017;Elliott and Pais 2006;Green, Bates, and Smyth 2007;Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018;Peck 2006;Rowe 2014;Stephens et al. 2009;Thiele 2017;Yarnal 2007;Zebrowski and Sage 2017). We mobilise this case because in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the short-term as well as in the long-term, New Orleans was a site where (1) the concept of resilience was particularly invoked(Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018;Rowe 2014;Zebrowski and Sage 2017), and (2) many different types of SIs were launched, with a number of community-based innovation initiatives competing with neoliberal initiatives(Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018;Rowe 2014) and innovative top-down policy moves ...
In this essay we expose three dark sides of social innovation (SI) by mobilising the concept of resilience. We examine implications for SI from (1) resilience thinking, (2) (critical) resilience studies and (3) the exceptional contexts in which resilience is needed. The first dark side of SI is that SIs lead to disruptions likely to cause unintended adverse consequences. The second dark side is that top-down SIs tend to be deployed in the name of vulnerable communities, but in neoliberal ways mainly concerned in making these communities more productive for society, at the risk of heightening their marginalisation. The third dark side is that SI discourse lends itself too easily to hijackings by powerful actors driving their own interests of capital accumulation while calling for communities to self-organise. We discuss how critical perspectives on resilience help us challenge these dark sides of SI.
... Findings from Study 2 add to a growing body of research documenting the psychological impact of natural disasters (Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2001;Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul, 2009;Uchida, Takahashi, & Kawahara, 2014). ...
Records of Internet search are increasingly used in social science research. Three studies reported here tested (a) whether population-level anxiety is reflected in Internet search data and (b) the socioecological and cultural factors of anxiety. Using data from Japan, we found that the Google search rates of anxiety are associated with self-reported anxiety (Study 1), and that the anxiety search rates increased following a major disaster (Study 2). These findings suggest that anxiety is searched more often on the Internet when and where people are feeling anxious. However, while search rates of anxiety increased since 2010, there was no sign of worsening anxiety among Japanese in 2 large national collections of data on self-reported anxiety (Study 1). Study 3 used search data to examine an anxiety-related cultural phenomenon. Consistent with a lay belief that is rarely empirically examined, we found that anxiety among Japanese increases in spring when millions in the country make school and career transitions. Together, these findings add to psychologists' understanding of anxiety, particularly its vulnerability to environmental threat and social disconnection. These findings also demonstrate the potential of Internet search data in advancing psychological research, particularly in examining mental processes' socioecological, cultural, and temporal factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... On the other hand, reflecting the predominance of the disjoint model of agency in mainstream American contexts, the target person might be evaluated negatively independent of the evaluator's social status. A study by Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, and Eloul (2009), which investigated North Americans' reactions to survivors of Hurricane Katrina, supports the latter possibility. ...
This research examined whether socioeconomic status (SES) predicts reactions to situations in which a group member decides for the entire group, thereby depriving other group members of personal choice. We found, as predicted, that Americans with higher subjective SES accepted choice deprivation less and demanded personal choice more than subjectively lower SES Americans. Subjective SES was a better predictor for reactions to choice deprivation than objective indicators of SES. The degree to which participants interpreted the deprivation of choice as a violation of their personal freedom partially mediated the relationship between subjective SES and reactions to choice deprivation. The results highlight the role subjective SES measurements can play and the need to consider social status and associated models of agency when interpreting behavior and motivation related to choice in American contexts.
... Although domination sometimes occurs through deliberate acts of direct discrimination or conscious exercise of racial power, a cultural psychology analysis suggests that their more typical form may be preferential reproduction of apparently "neutral" cultural tools that nevertheless have "disparate impact" and reproduce dominant-group advantage. For example, relatively innocuous constructions of behavior as choice not only resonate with middle-class understandings of action and desires for perceived control, but also "just happen" to reproduce racial inequality when people withhold aid or justice from victims because they made bad "choices" (e.g., for "choosing" to live in ethnic enclaves or to stay in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; see Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul, 2009). Similarly, models of ideal affect that emphasize high arousal positive states not only resonate with white American understandings and desires (Tsai, 2007), but also delegitimize the experience of dissatisfaction that often accompanies motivation for social change (Ahmed, 2008;Becker & Maracek, 2008). ...
The authors describe a cultural psychology approach to social–personality. Extending the
standard social–psychological emphasis on the importance of context, the first section
considers the cultural constitution of personal experience. Engagement with cultural
affordances shapes a person with associated residual tendencies that constitute a form of context in person: embodied traces of a person’s engagement with ecological structures of mind that reconstitute the person’s habitual ways of being. Extending an emphasis on importance of subjective construal, the second section considers the psychological constitution of cultural worlds. As people act on subjective interpretations, their behavior leaves traces on objective realities that constitute a form of person in context: everyday constructions of reality bearing the influence of personal activity. A cultural psychological analysis balances the traditional social psychological emphasis on the power of the situation with restored emphasis on the power of the culturally grounded person as (re)constructor of intentional worlds.
In understanding the psychology of social inequalities, research has often portrayed groups of individuals in disadvantaged positions as lacking in agency, skills, or motivation–portrayals that can stigmatize these groups. Countering this stigma, recent developments have been made in so‐called “strength‐based” research to better understand and acknowledge the agency, skills, and motivation people in disadvantaged positions often show. Yet, this research is not focused on understanding how inequalities emerge. The present research explores ways to study inequalities without risking to stigmatize people. For example, how can we address disparities in certain motivational factors (e.g., belonging, or confidence) without stigmatizing groups as lacking motivation? And how can we study the way people experience disadvantage without reducing them to the role of weak, passive victims? To answer such questions, we integrate traditional social‐inequality research with recent advances in strength‐based research in what we call a “holistic approach” to studying inequality. At the core of this approach is a simultaneous recognition of context‐level disadvantage (a focus of traditional inequality research) and individual‐level agency (a focus of strength‐based research). This approach allows for a broader–a holistic–perspective on existing inequality‐research, and points to underexplored research questions within social psychology (e.g., how do people actively respond to disadvantage?). After outlining this approach, we distill it into 10 practical guidelines and illustrate how to implement guidelines in an existing research agenda. In doing so, we hope to support authors, reviewers, editors, and other stakeholders aiming for an accurate and non‐stigmatizing study of inequalities.
Agency - the capacity to produce an effect - is a foundational aspect of medical education. Agency is usually conceptualized at the level of the individual, with each learner charged with taking responsibility to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This conceptualization is problematic. First, collaboration is a central component of patient care, which does not align well with an individualistic approach. Second, a growing body of literature documents how minoritized and marginalized trainees experience inequitable restrictions on their agency. Third, a myriad of structures across medicine restricts individual agency. In this guide, we present four conceptualizations of agency beyond the individual that medical researchers can incorporate to modernize and broaden their understanding of agency: (a) temporal: how individuals wrestle with their own agency across time; (b) relational: how agency is co-created dialogically with other individuals and structures; (c) cultural: how culture and cultural resources shape possibilities for agency; and (d) structural: how restrictive structures - like racism and ableism that unjustly curtail individual agency - are created, maintained, and resisted. For each dimension, we first describe it by drawing from and summarizing the work of theorists across disciplines. Next, we highlight an article from medical education that makes particularly good use of this dimension, discussing some of its relevant findings. Finally, we offer a set of questions that researchers in medical education can ask to highlight the dimension of agency in their work, and we suggest potential directions for future inquiry. We conclude by offering an example of how a researcher might understand a resident's educational experiences through each of the four proposed dimensions and further explicating the complexity of agency in medical education.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that all emergencies, major incidents and disease outbreaks can have substantial mental health consequences, and it has demonstrated the proven need for additional care for populations in the wake of disasters. This book brings together practice and recent developments in pre-hospital emergency care, emergency medicine and major trauma care with the wellbeing, psychosocial and mental health aspects of preparing for and responding to emergencies, incidents, terrorism, disasters, epidemics, and pandemics. Practical suggestions are included for future planning to provide better care for people caught up in emergencies. Setting it apart from other books on emergency preparedness is its specific focus on the psychosocial demands imposed on staff of healthcare and responding services. Featuring expert contributions from a wide variety of disciplines, this book appeals to people working within mental healthcare, emergency care, pre-hospital medicine, Blue Light services, public health, humanitarian care, emergency planning, and disaster management.
Within psychology, the underachievement of students from working-class backgrounds has often been explained as a product of individual characteristics such as a lack of intelligence or motivation. Here, we propose an integrated model illustrating how educational contexts contribute to social class disparities in education over and beyond individual characteristics. According to this new Social Class–Academic Contexts Mismatch model, social class disparities in education are due to several mismatches between the experiences that students from working-class backgrounds bring with them to the classroom and those valued in academic contexts—specifically, mismatches between (a) academic contexts’ culture of independence and the working-class orientation to interdependence, (b) academic contexts’ culture of competition and the working-class orientation toward cooperation, (c) the knowledge valued in academic contexts and the knowledge developed through working-class socialization, and (d) the social identities valued in academic contexts and the negatively stereotyped social identities of students from working-class backgrounds. Because of these mismatches, students from working-class backgrounds are likely to experience discomfort and difficulty in the classroom. We further propose that, when attempting to make sense of these first-order effects, students and teachers rely on inherent characteristics (e.g., ability, motivation) more often than warranted; conversely, they overlook extrinsic, contextual factors. In turn, this explanatory bias toward inherent features leads (a) students from working-class backgrounds to experience self-threat and (b) their teachers to treat them unfairly. These second-order effects magnify social class disparities in education. This integrated model has the potential to reshape research and discourse on social class and education.
The Philippines’ risk communication system relies on information dissemination, which disregards local capacity for managing risk. This research aimed to examine risk communication in Roxas City, an important economic center working on capacitation after damage by Supertyphoon Haiyan. Guided by Encoding-Decoding theory, the researcher interviewed government officers and facilitated discussions at coastal and inland communities. The researcher found that local government viewed communities as audiences who intuitively knew what to do with scientific information. The coastal community had indigenous knowledge but acted based on fear of sanctions. The inland community discussed information from media, which led to community decision-making. These findings imply that local governments should consider the role of social networks unique to different communities when planning risk communication and hazard response.
We propose that individuals low (vs. high) in socioeconomic status (SES) are vulnerable to impaired relationship functioning through two different mutually reinforcing paths that both directly implicate perceptions of control and relational devaluation. The first of these involves chronic exposure to relational devaluation as a function of factors such as stigmatization in broader society that serves to undermine low SES individuals’ perceptions of control. The second involves enhanced reactivity to relationally devaluing experiences such as discrimination and ostracism as a function of this limited reserve of perceived control. We present a perceived control‐relationally devaluing experiences model of low SES vulnerability to impaired relationship functioning that incorporates these predictions and further specifies how low SES individuals’ reduced perceptions of control may help account for documented associations between low SES and negative interpersonal outcomes such as hostility, aggression, and reduced relationship quality. We conclude by considering implications for intervention as well as potential alternative and complementary mechanisms.
Forensic engineering assessments of tornado damage have consistently shown that inadequate or absence of anchorage of mobile and manufactured homes (MMHs) has been the primary cause of structure failure, leading to high tornado fatality rates in the Southeast United States. Therefore, it is important to determine whether these residents have anchored their homes and their underlying motivations. This research quantitatively explored various factors influencing Southeast US MMH residents’ current anchorage decisions and qualitatively explored other contextual factors for these decisions, including general mitigation knowledge and financial means. Results showed age, insurance, community shelter access, and self-efficacy perceptions reliably distinguished those who have already anchored their homes from those who have not and have no intentions to do so. On the other hand, among those who have not already anchored their homes, only tornado risk perceptions marginally distinguished those with intentions to anchor from those without. Also, those not already anchored were least likely to believe in the five tested myths and were potentially willing to spend 500–999 on general mitigation, though few had ever considered fortifying their MMH and cost was the most cited barrier to doing so. The majority of participants knew nothing about the wind resistance of their home and only half of the sample knew the mitigation term, “manufactured home tie-down.” The knowledge gained here can help various public-facing communication entities design effective outreach materials to facilitate this population better protecting themselves from tornadoes by way of strengthening their vulnerable homes.
Natural disasters are increasingly impacting the lives of organizations. The COVID‐19 pandemic has brought attention to how organizations improve their resilience and learn how to emerge stronger after such events. While there has been little integration between the literature on organizational learning and resilience, this article draws on both streams of literature to develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three different organizational processes emerging in the aftermath of a disaster (resilience, learning from disasters, and learning through disasters). Each response is characterized by a specific outcome, mechanism, and temporal orientation. Moreover, the proposed framework discusses the dynamic relationships between these responses. While learning from disasters and resilience combine in a cyclical dynamic that leads to an upgrade in existing organizational capabilities, learning through disasters involves a transformative dynamic that leads to expanding organizational capabilities in new domains. This article is of value to both practitioners and scholars. For managers, it derives practical implications for improving the organization's capacity for transformation in the aftermath of a disaster such as COVID‐19. For scholars, it contributes to the debate about the long‐term interrelation between different organizational response to disasters and sheds light on the mechanisms of organizational renewal in the aftermath of a disaster.
Violations of moral purity, the moral foundation oriented toward protecting the sanctity of the body and soul, are not limited to social settings: brands, employees, and politicians are guilty of some pretty gross behaviors. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how consumers react to purity violations. In the current work, we propose that condemnation of purity violations is shaped by the combination of pathogen threat and childhood socioeconomic status (SES). We test this prediction across seven studies, collected pre- and mid-pandemic, using experimental manipulations of pathogen threat and measured differences in the perceived threat of COVID-19. We find that when pathogen threat is salient, people who grew up wealthy show a greater increase in condemnation of purity violations than people who grew up poor. Further, our results suggest this effect is due to class-based differences in the perceived controllability of pathogen threats.
During crisis events, emergency responders must verify the particulars of an event before sending out warning messages. The gap between an event's occurrence and official notification is often used by those impacted by that event to verify what is happening before taking action. The addition of information communication technologies has had an impact on what we term the verification pause. This pause is the amount of time it takes to verify what has happened before messages are received and before reaction can begin. More than milling about post notification, this understudied period of time is rarely visible for researchers. The present case study contains an analysis of a verification pause between an earthquake event and the actions taken by students in a classroom in a large university in the United States. The students in the classroom felt the earthquake and immediately began to search for verification that what they felt was indeed an earthquake. The authors conclude with a discussion of the utility of case studies and call for more focused analysis of the similarities between cases.
After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, intercultural friction and aversion arose between evacuees and host community residents in relocation areas. We examined whether a belief in group interdependence—the extent to which an individual believes that group function is realized through interdependence with related other groups—is consistent with positive interactions between evacuees and hosts. A door‐to‐door survey of 77 evacuees and 75 hosts revealed that residents with an integrated social identity interacted favorably with both ingroup and outgroup members, and that a belief in group interdependence was consistent with the integration of social identity between the evacuee and host communities. Those findings suggest that a belief in group interdependence can reduce intercultural conflict by allowing both immigrants and host residents to acquire an integrated social identity without the dilemma of internalizing different cultures into an individual's mind.
Social disparities tied to social group membership(s) are prevalent and persistent within mainstream institutions (e.g., schools/workplaces). Accordingly, psychological science has harnessed selves - which are malleable and meaningfully shaped by social group membership(s) - as solutions to inequality. We propose and review evidence that theoretical and applied impacts of leveraging 'selves as solutions' can be furthered through the use of a stigma and strengths framework. Specifically, this framework conceptualizes selves in their fuller complexity, allowing the same social group membership to be associated with stigma, risk, and devaluation as well as strengths, resilience, and pride. We provide evidence that by enacting policies and practices that (a) reduce/minimize stigma and (b) recognize/include strengths, mainstream institutions can more fully mitigate social disparities tied to inclusion, achievement and well-being. Using social groups that vary in status/power we examine implications of this framework including the potential to foster positive, recursive, and intergroup impacts on social inequalities.
Previous research has documented that people from working-class contexts have fewer skills linked to academic success than their middle-class counterparts (e.g., worse problem-solving skills). Challenging this idea, we propose that one reason why people from working-class contexts underperform is because U.S. measures of achievement tend to assess people individually. We theorize that working together on measures of achievement will create a cultural match with the interdependent selves common among people from working-class contexts, therefore improving their sense of fit and performance. We further theorize that effective group processes will serve as a mechanism that helps to explain when and why working together affords these benefits. Four studies utilizing diverse methods support our theorizing. Using archival data on college student grades, Study 1 finds that groups with higher proportions of students from working-class contexts perform better. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of collegiate student-athletes, Study 2 suggests that the benefits of working together for people from working-class contexts are moderated by whether groups engage in effective group processes. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that working together (vs. individually) causally improves the fit and performance of people from working-class contexts. Study 4 identifies effective group processes as a mediator: People from working-class (vs. middle-class) contexts more frequently engage in effective group processes, thus improving their performance. Our findings suggest that assessing achievement individually is not class-neutral. Instead, assessing achievement in a way that is congruent with interdependent models of self-as people work together-can help realize the full potential of people from working-class contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Andrew Murray argues that you can use your forced exile from the lab to produce better future experiments by dissecting your past failures and successes and collaboratively critiquing the experiments you're planning for your return to the lab.
In this research, we examine the effect of childhood socioeconomic status on patience, which is operationalized as willingness to wait for a chosen alternative. Because decision makers socialized in low (high) socioeconomic status environments learn a model of agency that emphasizes exerting self-control (vs. exerting environmental control), we predict that they will exhibit greater (less) willingness to wait for a chosen alternative. In three studies in which participants of various ages chose an alternative and then learned that it was not immediately available, lower childhood socioeconomic status consistently predicted greater willingness to wait and less negative emotional reactions to waiting. We discuss implications of this effect in organizational settings.
The current paper reports the results of a survey on past and future evacuation decision-making in response to a volcanic eruption (or the threat thereof)at Pacaya volcano, Guatemala. In 2010, Pacaya experienced its largest eruption in over half a century, causing more than 2500 evacuations and resulting in the damage or destruction of hundreds of homes, injuries to dozens of people, and the death of one journalist. Despite a pronounced increase in eruptive activity and the high threat of injury or death, many residents surrounding Pacaya volcano chose to stay in their homes throughout the eruption event. Our study seeks to understand why some households ignored social cues, physical hazards, and evacuation messages, and instead chose to stay in harm's way during a volcanic crisis. Using data obtained from a door-to-door survey conducted in the Pacaya region in October 2016, we found that evacuation behavior during the 2010 eruption was influenced most strongly by one's exposure to hazards, perception of hazards, and perception of readiness. We also found that prior evacuation experience from the 2010 eruption, perceptions of home vulnerability, and warning messages all have a strong influence on one's intention to evacuate in a future volcanic crisis. Finally, we found that perceived risk to one's home or property may have less of an impact on evacuation intention than emergency personnel tend to assume. Building on these findings, we discuss ways to improve evacuation communication in the face of a future eruption.
The purpose of this article is to investigate the verification pause—that moment when people assess how to respond to a disaster. The verification pause is potentially extended due to excess or insufficient information. Most evidence around the verification pause and its relation to new media is anecdotal. Using direct observations and interviews, this article presents a case study of the verification pause during an earthquake event. A classroom of 19 university students spent four minutes post-event behavior before evacuating. Through adaptive structuration theory (AST), the article contextualizes the students' response. Students used laptops and mobile devices to seek and share earthquake information with their extended social network. These online exchanges blended with the physical world as students shared what they learned with the classroom. The article concludes by suggesting that improved disaster response training and timely access to trustworthy information could shorten the verification pause and possibly save lives.
It is assumed that people seek positive self-regard; that is, they are motivated to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views. The cross-cultural generalizability of such motivations was addressed by examining Japanese culture. Anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses revealed that many elements of Japanese culture are incongruent with such motivations. Moreover, the empirical literature provides scant evidence for a need for positive self-regard among Japanese and indicates that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japanese. It is argued that the need for self-regard must be culturally variant because the constructions of self and regard themselves differ across cultures. The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture. Conventional interpretations of positive self-regard are too narrow to encompass the Japanese experience.
This reply to S. J. Gould's (1999) critique of J. Heckhausen and R. Schulz's (1995) life-span theory of control addresses four issues: (1) the universal claim that primary control holds functional primacy over secondary control, (2) the status of secondary control as a confederate to primary control, (3) empirical evidence and paradigms for investigating universality and cultural variations, and (4) the capacity of the human control system to manage both gains and losses in control throughout the life span and aging-related decline in particular. Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence from evolutionary, comparative, developmental, and cultural psychology are presented to support the authors' view that primary control striving holds functional primacy throughout the life span and across cultural and historical settings. Recommendations for empirically investigating the variations in the way primary control striving is expressed in different cultures are outlined.
J. Heckhausen and R. Schulz (see record 1995-24550-001) proposed a life-span theory of control that applies the concepts of primary and secondary control. Although their approach is useful in focusing attention on control across the life span in Western contexts, it breaks down when seen from various Asian and other cultural perspectives. In much of Asia, secondary control takes on primacy and results in some control perspectives and manifestations different from those conceptualized by J. Heckhausen and R. Schulz. An examination of control in both Asia and the West indicates that there is need to reconceptualize the lifespan theory of control so that primary and secondary control are more accurately described, each type of control is treated as heterogeneous, and the perceived primacy of one or the other type of control is viewed as a matter of motivational or cultural focus.
Publisher Summary
This chapter presents a systematic pattern behind apparently unrelated individual behaviors. The manners in which the characteristic traits of a good person are interpreted in society tend to influence the everyday behavior of people. Cross-cultural theories of individualism and collectivism are discussed next, to help the readers form a proper perspective on the personal and social identity of an individual. The entire study is done in a cultural frame, highlighting the importance of ethnic and racial identities. The individualistic traits of Americans are contrasted with the generally collective tendencies of the Europeans. The various social representations of race and ethnicity play a major role in influencing racial and ethnic identities of Afro-American groups. One's “self-concept” also plays an important role in determining the performance of individuals, but for minor groups, this concept is guided more by social influences. The tripartite model of identity is reviewed in this context. The importance of racial and ethnic identity in the determination of social identity is also highlighted here. The validity of the tripartite model is showcased in the concluding portion of the chapter, with the help of research results.
Four studies examined the consequences of American Indian mascots and other prevalent representations of American Indians on aspects of the self-concept for American Indian students. When exposed to Chief Wahoo, Chief Illinwek, Pocahontas, or other common American Indian images, American Indian students generated positive associations (Study 1, high school) but reported depressed state self-esteem (Study 2, high school), and community worth (Study 3, high school), and fewer achievement-related possible selves (Study 4, college). We suggest that American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves.
In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
In this chapter, we first describe the individualism and collectivism as cultural frames, emphasizing the collectivist roots of racial and ethnic identity. We then discuss the social representation of race and ethnicity and how this representation influences racial and ethnic identity for African Americans. We explain how racial and ethnic identity can function to moderate the risk of individualistic cultural frames for minority group members, buffer individuals from racism, and motivate minority group members to achieve their goals. We propose that this resiliency-promoting function is most likely to happen when ethnic or racial identity is chronically or situationally salient and when this identity includes 3 components: a sense of connectedness to other African Americans, an awareness of racism or structural barriers, and achievement as centrally connected to being an African American. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
J. Heckhausen and R. Schulz (see record
1995-24550-001) proposed a life-span theory of control that applies the concepts of primary and secondary control. Although their approach is useful in focusing attention on control across the life span in Western contexts, it breaks down when seen from various Asian and other cultural perspectives. In much of Asia, secondary control takes on primacy and results in some control perspectives and manifestations different from those conceptualized by J. Heckhausen and R. Schulz. An examination of control in both Asia and the West indicates that there is need to reconceptualize the lifespan theory of control so that primary and secondary control are more accurately described, each type of control is treated as heterogeneous, and the perceived primacy of one or the other type of control is viewed as a matter of motivational or cultural focus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using experimental paradigms from economics and social psychology, the authors examined the cross-cultural applicability of 3 widely held assumptions about preference and choice: People (a) recruit or construct preferences to make choices; (b) choose according to their preferences; and (c) are motivated to express their preferences in their choices. In 6 studies, they compared how middle-class North American and Indian participants choose among consumer products. Participants in both contexts construct nonrandom preferences at similar speeds. Those in Indian contexts, however, are slower to make choices, less likely to choose according to their personal preferences, and less motivated to express their preferences in their choices. The authors infer that the strong link between preferences and choices observed among North Americans is not a universal feature of human nature. Instead, this link reflects the disjoint model of agency, which prescribes that people should choose freely on the basis of their preferences. In contrast, Indian contexts reflect and promote a conjoint model of agency, according to which agency is responsive to the desires and expectations of important others and may require restraining one's preferences.
To assess the validity and utility of PRIME-MD (Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders), a new rapid procedure for diagnosing mental disorders by primary care physicians.
Survey; criterion standard.
Four primary care clinics.
A total of 1000 adult patients (369 selected by convenience and 631 selected by site-specific methods to avoid sampling bias) assessed by 31 primary care physicians.
PRIME-MD diagnoses, independent diagnoses made by mental health professionals, functional status measures (Short-Form General Health Survey), disability days, health care utilization, and treatment/referral decisions.
Twenty-six percent of the patients had a PRIME-MD diagnosis that met full criteria for a specific disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Revised Third Edition. The average time required of the primary care physician to complete the PRIME-MD evaluation was 8.4 minutes. There was good agreement between PRIME-MD diagnoses and those of independent mental health professionals (for the diagnosis of any PRIME-MD disorder, kappa = 0.71; overall accuracy rate = 88%). Patients with PRIME-MD diagnoses had lower functioning, more disability days, and higher rates of health care utilization than did patients without PRIME-MD diagnoses (for all measures, P < .005). Nearly half (48%) of 287 patients with a PRIME-MD diagnosis who were somewhat or fairly well-known to their physicians had not been recognized to have that diagnosis before the PRIME-MD evaluation. A new treatment or referral was initiated for 62% of the 125 patients with a PRIME-MD diagnosis who were not already being treated.
PRIME-MD appears to be a useful tool for identifying mental disorders in primary care practice and research.
This reply to S. J. Gould's (1999) critique of J. Heckhausen and R. Schulz's (1995) life-span theory of control addresses four issues: (1) the universal claim that primary control holds functional primacy over secondary control, (2) the status of secondary control as a confederate to primary control, (3) empirical evidence and paradigms for investigating universality and cultural variations, and (4) the capacity of the human control system to manage both gains and losses in control throughout the life span and aging-related decline in particular. Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence from evolutionary, comparative, developmental, and cultural psychology are presented to support the authors' view that primary control striving holds functional primacy throughout the life span and across cultural and historical settings. Recommendations for empirically investigating the variations in the way primary control striving is expressed in different cultures are outlined.
It is assumed that people seek positive self-regard; that is, they are motivated to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views. The cross-cultural generalizability of such motivations was addressed by examining Japanese culture. Anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses revealed that many elements of Japanese culture are incongruent with such motivations. Moreover, the empirical literature provides scant evidence for a need for positive self-regard among Japanese and indicates that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japanese. It is argued that the need for self-regard must be culturally variant because the constructions of self and regard themselves differ across cultures. The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture. Conventional interpretations of positive self-regard are too narrow to encompass the Japanese experience.
The primary purpose of this article was to offer a methodological critique in support of arguments that racial categories should be replaced as explanatory constructs in psychological research and theory. To accomplish this goal, the authors (a) summarized arguments for why racial categories should be replaced; (b) used principles of the scientific method to show that racial categories lack conceptual meaning; (c) identified common errors in researchers' measurement, statistical analyses, and interpretation of racial categories as independent variables; and (d) used hierarchical regression analysis to illustrate a strategy for replacing racial categories in research designs with conceptual variables. Implications for changing the study of race in psychology are discussed.
Using educational attainment to indicate socioeconomic status, the authors examined models of agency and effects of choice among European American adults of different educational backgrounds in 3 studies. Whereas college-educated (BA) participants and their preferred cultural products (i.e., rock music lyrics) emphasized expressing uniqueness, controlling environments, and influencing others, less educated (HS) participants and their preferred cultural products (i.e., country music lyrics) emphasized maintaining integrity, adjusting selves, and resisting influence. Reflecting these models of agency, HS and BA participants differently responded to choice in dissonance and reactance paradigms: BA participants liked chosen objects more than unchosen objects, but choice did not affect HS participants' preferences. Results suggest that HS and BA models of agency qualitatively differ, despite overlap between HS and BA worlds.
In the present research, consisting of 2 correlational studies (N = 616) including a representative U.S. sample and 2 experiments (N = 350), the authors investigated how stereotypes and emotions shape behavioral tendencies toward groups, offering convergent support for the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes (BIAS) map framework. Warmth stereotypes determine active behavioral tendencies, attenuating active harm (harassing) and eliciting active facilitation (helping). Competence stereotypes determine passive behavioral tendencies, attenuating passive harm (neglecting) and eliciting passive facilitation (associating). Admired groups (warm, competent) elicit both facilitation tendencies; hated groups (cold, incompetent) elicit both harm tendencies. Envied groups (competent, cold) elicit passive facilitation but active harm; pitied groups (warm, incompetent) elicit active facilitation but passive harm. Emotions predict behavioral tendencies more strongly than stereotypes do and usually mediate stereotype-to-behavioral-tendency links.
Social class is one important source of models of agency--normative guidelines for how to be a "good" person. Using choice as a prototypically agentic action, 5 studies test the hypotheses that models of agency prevalent in working-class (WK) contexts reflect a normative preference for similarity to others, whereas models prevalent in middle-class (MD) contexts reflect a preference for difference from others. Focusing on participants' choices, Studies 1 and 2 showed that participants from WK relative to MD contexts more often chose pens that appeared similar to, rather than different from, other pens in the choice set, and more often chose the same images as another participant. Examining participants' responses to others' choices, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that participants from WK relative to MD contexts liked their chosen pens more when a confederate chose similarly and responded more positively when a friend chose the same car in a hypothetical scenario. Finally, Study 5 found that car advertisements targeting WK rather than MD consumers more often emphasized connection to, rather than differentiation from, others, suggesting that models of agency are reflected in pervasive cultural products.
Many tendencies in social perceivers' judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories of agency acquired from cultural traditions. Whereas, American culture primarily conceptualizes agency as a property of individual persons, other cultures conceptualize agency primarily in terms of collectives such as groups or non-human actors such as deities or fate. Cultural conceptions of agency exist in public forms (discourses, texts, and institutions) and private forms (perceiver's knowledge structures), and more prominent the public representations of a specific conception in a society, the more chronically accessible it will be in perceiver's minds. We review evidence for these claims by contrasting North American and Chinese cultures. From this integrative model of social perception as mediated by agency conceptions, we draw insights for research on implicit theories and research on culture. What implicit theory research gains is a better grasp on the content, origins, and variation of the knowledge structures central to social perception. What cultural psychology gains is middle-range model of the mechanism underlying cultural influence on dispositional attribution, which yields precise predictions about the domain-specificity and dynamics of cultural differences.
Objective.
—To assess the validity and utility of PRIME-MD (Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders), a new rapid procedure for diagnosing mental disorders by primary care physicians.Design.
—Survey; criterion standard.Setting.
—Four primary care clinics.Subjects.
—A total of 1000 adult patients (369 selected by convenience and 631 selected by site-specific methods to avoid sampling bias) assessed by 31 primary care physicians.Main Outcome Measures.
—PRIME-MD diagnoses, independent diagnoses made by mental health professionals, functional status measures (Short-Form General Health Survey), disability days, health care utilization, and treatment/ referral decisions.Results.
—Twenty-six percent of the patients had a PRIME-MD diagnosis that met full criteria for a specific disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Revised Third Edition. The average time required of the primary care physician to complete the PRIME-MD evaluation was 8.4 minutes. There was good agreement between PRIME-MD diagnoses and those of independent mental health professionals (for the diagnosis of any PRIME-MD disorder, κ=0.71; overall accuracy rate=88%). Patients with PRIME-MD diagnoses had lower functioning, more disability days, and higher rates of health care utilization than did patients without PRIME-MD diagnoses (for all measures, P<.005). Nearly half (48%) of 287 patients with a PRIME-MD diagnosis who were somewhat or fairly well-known to their physicians had not been recognized to have that diagnosis before the PRIME-MD evaluation. A new treatment or referral was initiated for 62% of the 125 patients with a PRIME-MD diagnosis who were not already being treated.Conclusion.
—PRIME-MD appears to be a useful tool for identifying mental disorders in primary care practice and research.(JAMA. 1994;272:1749-1756)
The papers in this volume, a multidisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, explore the ways in which cultural knowledge is organized and used in everyday language and understanding. Employing a variety of methods, which rely heavily on linguistic data, the authors offer analyses of domains of knowledge ranging across the physical, social, and psychological worlds, and reveal the importance of tacit, presupposed knowledge in the conduct of everyday life. The authors argue that cultural knowledge is organized in 'cultural models' - storylike chains of prototypical events that unfold in simplified worlds - and explore the nature and role of these models. They demonstrate that cultural knowledge may take either proposition-schematic or image-schematic form, each enabling the performance of different kinds of cognitive tasks. Metaphor and metonymy are shown to have special roles in the construction of cultural models. The authors also demonstrates that some widely applicable cultural models recur nested within other, more special-purpose models. Finally, it is shown that shared models play a critical role in thinking, allowing humans to master, remember, and use the vast amount of knowledge required in everyday life. This innovative collection will appeal to anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, students of artificial intelligence, and other readers interested in the processes of everyday human understanding.
The present article attempts to overcome some of the problems involved in estimating race-of-interviewer effects in a nonexperimental national survey. Individual items as well as scales were examined, using General Social Survey (GSS) data. Race-of-interviewer effects large enough to justify the practice of matching interviewer and respondent race for interviews on racial topics were found for both black and white respondents. A few such effects were found for nonracial items among blacks, but the range of items involved is smaller than what has been reported in previous studies. The impact of race-of-interviewer effects on mean estimates in the GSS appears to be small for white respondents, due to the small proportion of cross-race interviews. The proportion of cross-race interviews among blacks is larger and more variable over the years, and the impact of race-of-interviewer effects should be considered when analyzing items which show these effects.
This book turns the tables on the way prejudice has been looked at in the past. Almost all of the current information on prejudice focuses on the person holding prejudiced beliefs. This book, however, provides a summary of research focusing on the intended victims of prejudice. The 1st part discusses how people identify prejudice, what types of prejudice they encounter, and how people react to this prejudice in interpersonal and intergroup settings. The 2nd section discusses the effect of prejudice on task performance, assessment of one's own abilities, self-esteem, and stress. The final section examines how people cope with prejudice, including a discussion of coping mechanisms, reporting sexual harassment, and how identity is related to effective coping. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Hurricane Katrina exposed the politics of race, poverty, and
inequality to broad public view for the first time in a generation. But
the storm and its aftermath also constituted a metaphor for the deep
tension between color-blind and race-conscious models of politics that has
long been one of the central and defining themes of U.S. politics. In this
essay, I explore Hurricane Katrina as a window onto this fundamental
dualism in U.S. political culture, its ambivalent embrace of both color
blindness and race consciousness. In the storm's immediate aftermath,
President George W. Bush became the unlikely mouthpiece of this dualism,
and I examine his contradictory statements about race in the storm's
wake and place them in historical context. I connect these presidential
statements to the broader political context that shapes race policymaking
in order to ask whether Katrina and the political response it provoked
might generate a policy response that takes seriously the problem of
racial inequality exposed by the storm. A brief account of a parallel
historical example of race-conscious policy emerging from political
conditions apparently dominated by color blindness, the emergence of
affirmative action in employment in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizes the
mixture of ideological and strategic, political factors that shape U.S.
race politics and policy, and suggests a set of ideological and
institutional conditions that may be necessary to generate such a dramatic
change in policy direction. I conclude by drawing some lessons from this
history for post-Katrina race politics.
Poll data showed that African Americans perceived more racism in the response to Hurricane Katrina than did White Americans. In this article, we consider claims about racism in Katrina-related events in light of (a) our program of experimental research on group differences in perception of racism and (b) the meta-theoretical perspective of Liberation Psychology (LP). First, this analysis suggests that White Americans may perceive less racism in the Katrina disaster because they are less likely than African Americans to know about historically documented acts of past racism (e.g., following the Mississippi flood of 1927). Second, group differences may arise because African Americans and White Americans face divergent motivations regarding perception of racism. Whereas African Americans may have motivations to be vigilant for the possibility of racism, White Americans may be motivated to deny racism because it constitutes a threat to social identity and to the legitimacy of the status quo.
We examine people's reactions to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, most of whom are minorities living in poverty, and we do so in terms of system justification theory. We propose that the social system was indirectly threatened for the public when inadequate relief efforts exposed governmental shortcomings, called into question the legitimacy of agency leadership, and highlighted racial inequality in America. In response to such system threats, both victims and observers (e.g., the general public, commentators, policy makers) are known to engage in various forms of system justification, including direct defense of the status quo, victim blaming, stereotyping, and internalization of inequality. These processes can reduce emotional distress and restore perceived legitimacy to the system, but they may have a number of troubling consequences for the storm victims in their efforts to return to normalcy.
This chapter argues for the importance of understanding the role of culture in structuring people's personal phenomenological experience. Such an understanding is (1) important per se and (2) important for elucidating the feedback loops between culture and self, between macro‐level ideology and micro‐level experience. To illustrate, we contrast the “outsider” perspective on the self of Asian‐Americans with the “insider” perspective on the world for Euro‐Americans. We examine (1) the outsider versus insider perspective by looking at the phenomenology of memory imagery, online imagery, visualization and embodiment of narratives, and relational versus egocentric projection; (2) the implications for cultural differences in egocentric biases that derive from dwelling too much in one's own internal experience; and (3) the emergence of developmental differences in characterizing the social world. We argue that the lessons of experience and cultural ideology cocreate each other, and we illustrate this by describing some ways that distinct phenomenological experiences are intimately tied to cultural norms, beliefs, and ideals.
First publ.in French,Paris,Ed.de Minuit,1970,La Réproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement.Incl.bibl., index,app., glossaire
Two studies examined the correspondence bias in attitude attributions of Koreans and Americans. Study I employed the classic attitude attribution paradigm of Jones and Harris and found that both Korean and American participants displayed the correspondence bias in the no-choice condition. This lack of difference might have been due to weak salience of the situational constraints. Study 2 was designed to make the situational constraints of the no-choice condition salient in two ways: (a) by asking participants to write an essay on a topic regardless of their genuine attitude toward the topic or (b) by also making it clear to participants that the essay by the target person was almost a copy of the arguments provided by the experimenter. The results showed that (a) American attributions were unaffected by the two salience manipulations, whereas Koreans' correspondence bias decreased with increasing salience of the constraints, and (b) Koreans were less susceptible to the actor observer bias. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68364/2/10.1177_0146167298249003.pdf
For more than a century, hundreds of psychologists have studied race and ethnicity. Yet this scholarship, like American culture at large, has been ambivalent, viewing race and ethnicity both as sources of pride, meaning, and motivation as well as sources of prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Underlying this ambivalence is widespread confusion about what race and ethnicity are and why they matter. To address this ambivalence and confusion, as well as to deepen the American conversation about race and ethnicity, the article first examines the field's unclear definitions and faulty assumptions. It then offers an integrated definition of race and ethnicity--dynamic sets of historically derived and institutionalized ideas and practices--while noting that race, although often used interchangeably with ethnicity, indexes an asymmetry of power and privilege between groups. Further, it shows how psychology's model of people as fundamentally independent, self-determining entities impedes the field's--and the nation's--understanding of how race and ethnicity influence experience and how the still-prevalent belief that race and ethnicity are biological categories hinders a more complete understanding of these phenomena. Five first propositions of a unified theory of race and ethnicity are offered.
In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented.
This study analyzes the ways 100 community-residing men and women aged 45 to 64 coped with the stressful events of daily living during one year. Lazarus's cognitive-phenomenological analysis of psychological stress provides the theoretical framework. Information about recently experienced stressful encounters was elicited through monthly interviews and self-report questionnaires completed between interviews. At the end of each interview and questionnaire, the participant indicated on a 68-item Ways of Coping checklist those coping thoughts and actions used in the specific encounter. A mean of 13.3 episodes was reported by each participant. Two functions of coping, problem-focused and emotion-focused, are analyzed with separate measures. Both problem- and emotion-focused coping were used in 98% of the 1,332 episodes, emphasizing that coping conceptualized in either defensive or problem-solving terms is incomplete- both functions are usually involved. Intraindividual analyses show that people are more variable than consistent in their coping patterns. The context of an event, who is involved, how it is appraised, age, and gender are examined as potential influences on coping. Context and how the event is appraised are the most potent factors. Work contexts favor problem-focused coping, and health contexts favor emotion-focused coping. Situations in which the person thinks something constructive can be done or that are appraised as requiring more information favor problem-focused coping, whereas those having to be accepted favor emotion-focused coping. There are no effects associated with age, and gender differences emerge only in problem-focused coping: Men use more problem-focused coping than women at work and in situations having to be accepted and requiring more information. Contrary to the cultural stereotype, there are no gender differences in emotion-focused coping.
Two studies examined how Olympic performance is explained in American and Japanese contexts. Study 1, an analysis of media coverage of the 2000 and 2002 Olympics, shows that in both Japanese and American contexts, performance is construed mainly in terms of the actions of persons. However, Japanese and American accounts differ in their explanations of the nature and source of intentional agency, that is, in their models of agency. In Japanese contexts, agency is construed as conjoint and simultaneously implicates athletes' personal attributes (both positive and negative), background, and social and emotional experience. In American contexts, agency is construed as disjoint, separate from athletes' background or social and emotional experience; performance is explained primarily through positive personal characteristics and features of the competition. Study 2, in which participants chose information to be included in an athlete's description, confirms these findings. Differences in the construction of agency are reflected in and fostered by common cultural products (e.g., television accounts).
Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination (pp Perceptions of racism in Hurricane Katrina: A liberation psychology analysis
- N R Biernat
- C S Branscombe
- L S Crandall
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Biernat, N.R. Branscombe, C.S. Crandall, & L.S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination (pp. 215–246). Washington, DC: APA Books. Adams, G., O’Brien, L.T., & Nelson, J.C. (2006). Perceptions of racism in Hurricane Katrina: A liberation psychology analysis. Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy, 6, 215–235
African philosophy: Foundations of Black psychology
- W W Nobles
Nobles, W.W. (1991). African philosophy: Foundations of Black psychology. In R.L. Jones (Ed.), Black psychology (3rd ed., pp. 47-64). Berkeley, CA: Cobb & Henry.
Come hell or high water: Hurricane Katrina and the color of disaster
- M E Dyson
Dyson, M.E. (2006). Come hell or high water: Hurricane Katrina and
the color of disaster. Cambridge, MA: Basic Civitas.
The psychological predicament of women on welfare
- C M Steele
- D A Sherman
Steele, C.M., & Sherman, D.A. (1999). The psychological predicament
of women on welfare. In D.A. Prentice & D.T. Miller (Eds.),
Cultural divides: Understanding and overcoming group conflict
(pp. 393-428). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
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CNN Transcripts. (2005). Interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Retrieved April 30, 2009, from http://
transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0509/01/ltm.03.html
CNN Weather. (2005). FEMA chief: Victims bear some responsibility.
Retrieved April 30, 2009, from http://www.cnn.com/2005/
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Who are Katrina's victims?
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American individualisms: Child rearing and social class in three neighborhoods
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Kusserow, A.S. (2004). American individualisms: Child rearing and
social class in three neighborhoods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
In their own words: Well-being at midlife among high schooleducated and college-educated adults How healthy are we? A national study of well-being at midlife (pp
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Markus, H.R., Ryff, C.D., Curhan, K.B., & Palmersheim, K.A. (2004).
In their own words: Well-being at midlife among high schooleducated and college-educated adults. In O.G. Brim, C.D. Ryff,
& R.C. Kessler (Eds.), How healthy are we? A national study of
well-being at midlife (pp. 273–319). Chicago: University of
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FEMA chief: Victims bear some responsibility
- Cnn Weather