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Religion and Morality
Abstract
Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results and literatures that do not always interact. The Cognitive Science of Belief aims to integrate these disconnected lines of research to start a broader dialogue on the nature, role, and consequences of beliefs. It tackles timeless questions, as well as applications of beliefs that speak to current social issues. This multidisciplinary approach to beliefs will benefit graduate students and researchers in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, political science, economics, and religious studies.
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Research has probed the consequences of providing people with different types of information regarding why a person possesses a certain characteristic. However, this work has largely examined the consequences of different information subsets (e.g., information focusing on internal versus societal causes). Less work has compared several types of information within the same paradigm. Using the legal system as an example domain, we provided children (N=198 6- to 8-year-olds) with several types of information—including information highlighting internal moral character, internal biological factors, behavioral factors, and societal factors—about why a specific outcome (incarceration) might occur. We examined how such language shaped children’s attitudes. In Study 1, children reported the most positivity toward people who were incarcerated for societal reasons and the least positivity toward people who were incarcerated for their internal moral character; attitudes linked with behavioral information fell between these extremes. Studies 2a-2b suggested that Study 1’s effects could not be fully explained by participants drawing different about individuals in Study 1. Study 3 replicated Study 1’s results and showed that information linking incarceration with internal biological factors led to more positivity than information linking incarceration with internal moral character. Finally, Study 4 suggested that the patterns found in Studies 1 and 3 generalize to non-punitive contexts. Moreover, Study 4 found that the effects in Studies 1 and 3 emerged regardless of whether information was communicated via explanations or descriptions. These results demonstrate that how we express our beliefs about social phenomena shape the realities in which others live.
Coordinating competing interests can be difficult. Because law regulates human behavior, it is a candidate mechanism for creating coordination in the face of societal disagreement. We argue that findings from moral psychology are necessary to understand why law can effectively resolve co-occurring conflicts related to punishment and group membership. First, we discuss heterogeneity in punitive thought, focusing on punishment within the United States legal system. Though the law exerts a weak influence on punitive ideologies before punishment occurs, we argue that it effectively coordinates perceptions of individuals who have already been punished. Next, we discuss intergroup conflict, which often co-occurs with disagreements related to punishment and represents a related domain where coordination can be difficult to achieve. Here, we underscore how insights from moral psychology can promote equality via the law. These examples demonstrate how contributions from moral psychology are necessary to understand the connection between social cognition and law.
The present research explores the proposition that psychological essentialism determines how we understand the nature of some types of crime and associated attitudes regarding how perpetrators should be treated. Specifically, we argue that people believe certain crimes are highly essentialized, and they treat offenders in those categories more punitively. Study 1 assessed the applicability of essentialism to crime, demonstrating that different types of crime are indeed more essentialized than others. Two additional studies demonstrated that essentialism beliefs play a unique role in individuals’ endorsement of policies regarding treatment of offenders who commit crimes of a sexual nature. We consider the implications of our findings for offender rehabilitation and reintegration.
A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people's understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology.
People often view certain ways of classifying people (e.g., by gender, race, or ethnicity) as reflecting real distinctions found in nature. Such categories are viewed as marking meaningful, fundamental, and informative differences between distinct kinds of people. This article examines the development of these essentialist intuitive theories of how the social world is structured, along with the developmental consequences of these beliefs. We first examine the processes that give rise to social essentialism, arguing that essentialism emerges as children actively attempt to make sense of their environment by relying on several basic representational and explanatory biases. These developmental processes give rise to the widespread emergence of social essentialist views in early childhood, but allow for vast variability across development and cultural contexts in the precise nature of these beliefs. We then examine what is known and still to be discovered about the implications of essentialism for stereotyping, inter-group interaction, and the development of social prejudice. We conclude with directions for future research, particularly on the theoretical payoff that could be gained by including more diverse samples of children in future developmental investigations. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
This study investigated the motivational and social-cognitive foundations (i.e., inequality aversion, in-group bias, and theory of mind) that underlie the development of sharing behavior among 3- to 9-year-old Chinese children (N = 122). Each child played two mini-dictator games against an in-group member (friend) and an out-group member (stranger) to divide four stickers. Results indicated that there was a small to moderate age-related increase in children's egalitarian sharing with strangers, whereas the age effect was moderate to large in interactions with friends. Moreover, 3- to 4-year-olds did not treat strangers and friends differently, but 5- to 6-year-old and older children showed strong in-group favoritism. Finally, theory of mind was an essential prerequisite for children's sharing behavior toward strangers, but not a unique predictor of their sharing with friends. © 2016 The Authors. Child Development
Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter-group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies (N = 127, ages 4.5-6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out-group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter-group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice.
Much debate exists surrounding the applicability of genetic information in the courtroom, making the psychological processes underlying how people consider this information important to explore. This article addresses how people think about different kinds of causal explanations in legal decision-making contexts. Three studies involving a total of 600 Mechanical Turk and university participants found that genetic, versus environmental, explanations of criminal behavior lead people to view the applicability of various defense claims differently, perceive the perpetrator's mental state differently, and draw different causal attributions. Moreover, mediation and path analyses highlight the double-edged nature of genetic attributions-they simultaneously reduce people's perception of the perpetrator's sense of control while increasing people's tendencies to attribute the cause to internal factors and to expect the perpetrator to reoffend. These countervailing relations, in turn, predict sentencing in opposite directions, although no overall differences in sentencing or ultimate verdicts were found.
Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about (a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature.
Maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates of the
parameters in linear mixed-effects models can be determined using the lmer
function in the lme4 package for R. As for most model-fitting functions in R,
the model is described in an lmer call by a formula, in this case including
both fixed- and random-effects terms. The formula and data together determine a
numerical representation of the model from which the profiled deviance or the
profiled REML criterion can be evaluated as a function of some of the model
parameters. The appropriate criterion is optimized, using one of the
constrained optimization functions in R, to provide the parameter estimates. We
describe the structure of the model, the steps in evaluating the profiled
deviance or REML criterion, and the structure of classes or types that
represents such a model. Sufficient detail is included to allow specialization
of these structures by users who wish to write functions to fit specialized
linear mixed models, such as models incorporating pedigrees or smoothing
splines, that are not easily expressible in the formula language used by lmer.
The functions of cultural beliefs are often opaque to those who hold them. Accordingly, to benefit from cultural evolution's ability to solve complex adaptive problems, learners must be credulous. However, credulity entails costs, including susceptibility to exploitation, and effort wasted due to false beliefs. One determinant of the optimal level of credulity is the ratio between the costs of two types of errors: erroneous incredulity (failing to believe information that is true) and erroneous credulity (believing information that is false). This ratio can be expected to be asymmetric when information concerns hazards, as the costs of erroneous incredulity will, on average, exceed the costs of erroneous credulity; no equivalent asymmetry characterizes information concerning benefits. Natural selection can therefore be expected to have crafted learners' minds so as to be more credulous toward information concerning hazards. This negatively-biased credulity extends general negativity bias, the adaptive tendency for negative events to be more salient than positive events. Together, these biases constitute attractors that should shape cultural evolution via the aggregated effects of learners' differential retention and transmission of information. In two studies in the U.S., we demonstrate the existence of negatively-biased credulity, and show that it is most pronounced in those who believe the world to be dangerous, individuals who may constitute important nodes in cultural transmission networks. We then document the predicted imbalance in cultural content using a sample of urban legends collected from the Internet and a sample of supernatural beliefs obtained from ethnographies of a representative collection of the world's cultures, showing that beliefs about hazards predominate in both.
This study examined the relationship between White Americans' genetic explanations, conceptualized as genetic lay theories, for perceived racial differences and for sexual orientation, and attitudes toward Blacks, and gay men and lesbians, respectively. Considering contrasting public discourse surrounding race and sexual orientation, we predicted that genetic lay theories would be associated with greater prejudice toward Blacks, but less prejudice toward gay men and lesbians. The findings, based on a representative sample of 600 White Americans, were consistent with expectations. Results are discussed in relation to the literature on essentialism and implicit theories of the malleability of traits. The present research broadens our view of lay theories by showing how they support either prejudice or tolerance, depending on the target group.
Recent evidence suggests that perceptions of social class rank influence a variety of social cognitive tendencies, from patterns of causal attribution to moral judgment. In the present studies we tested the hypotheses that upper-class rank individuals would be more likely to endorse essentialist lay theories of social class categories (i.e., that social class is founded in genetically based, biological differences) than would lower-class rank individuals and that these beliefs would decrease support for restorative justice-which seeks to rehabilitate offenders, rather than punish unlawful action. Across studies, higher social class rank was associated with increased essentialism of social class categories (Studies 1, 2, and 4) and decreased support for restorative justice (Study 4). Moreover, manipulated essentialist beliefs decreased preferences for restorative justice (Study 3), and the association between social class rank and class-based essentialist theories was explained by the tendency to endorse beliefs in a just world (Study 2). Implications for how class-based essentialist beliefs potentially constrain social opportunity and mobility are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new religions is their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, according to which one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself). Cognitive science models that account for many properties of religion can be extended to these religions. Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that proportionality-based morality is highly intuitive to human beings. The cultural success of moralizing movements, secular or religious, could be explained based on proportionality.
Members of stigmatized groups often face dehumanization. Chapter 6 investigates whether individuals may also dehumanize perpetrators of bigotry. Three main findings emerge. First, participants perceive racists as less than fully human. This finding also generalizes to sexists, suggesting that the propensity to dehumanize perpetrators of bigotry is not limited to racists. Second, the extent to which participants dehumanize racists predicts the degree to which they report that ambiguous behaviors performed by strangers reflect racial bias. Third, this association does not emerge when participants evaluate behaviors performed by their friends, suggesting that views of “racists” in general may not be linked with evaluations of behaviors performed by at least some close others. These findings demonstrate that dehumanization extends to perpetrators of bias and predicts evaluations of their behaviors.
Kant argued that individuals should be punished “proportional to their internal wickedness,” and recent work has demonstrated that essentialism—the notion that observable characteristics reflect internal, biological, unchanging “essences”—influences moral judgment. However, these efforts have yielded conflicting results: essentialism sometimes increases and sometimes decreases moral condemnation. To resolve these discrepancies, we investigated the mechanisms by which essentialism influences moral judgment, focusing on perceptions of actors’ control over their behavior, the target of essentialism (particular behaviors vs. actors’ character), and the component of essentialism (biology vs. immutability). Participants punished people described as having a criminal essence more than those with a non‐criminal essence or no essence. Probing potential mechanisms underlying this effect, we found a mediating role for perceptions of control and weak influences of essentialism focus (behavior vs. character) and component of essentialism (biology vs. immutability). These results extend prior work on essentialism and moral cognition, demonstrating a causal link between perceptions of “internal wickedness” and moral judgment. Our findings also resolve discrepancies in past work on the influence of essentialism on moral judgment, highlighting the role that perceptions of actors’ control over their behavior play in moral condemnation.
Children and adults view many characteristics in an essentialist way-as innate, immutable, and biological. Prior work has typically investigated essentialism regarding broad domains (e.g., gender rather than maleness/femaleness). Using the example of morality, the current work asked whether individuals view different components of 1 domain (goodness/badness) differently and whether such views might influence behavior. Five- to 8-year-olds reported more essentialism than adults; however, both children and adults viewed goodness in more essentialist terms than badness. Although views of morally relevant characteristics in general did not significantly predict generosity (Study 1), essentialist views of the recipient did influence generosity (Studies 2 and 3). Adults shared fewer resources than would be expected by chance with people whose badness was described in essentialist terms (and consequently more resources than would be expected by chance with people whose badness was described in nonessentialist terms), an effect that did not appear to be driven by demand characteristics and that persisted even when both descriptions explicitly noted that the character would always remain bad. Although adults reported less essentialism than children, essentialist descriptions appeared to influence their behaviors more. This work highlights the need to investigate essentialism regarding specific domain components (e.g., goodness/badness) in addition to the domain overall (e.g., morality), partially because essentialism impacts behavior differently across components. Findings also suggest that emphasizing situational factors contributing to wrongdoing and a transgressor's ability to change may benefit people when they have committed moral violations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society. Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction-the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed. Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators. Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.
Adults report that moral characteristics—particularly widely shared moral beliefs—are central to identity. This perception appears driven by the view that changes to widely shared moral beliefs would alter friendships and that this change in social relationships would, in turn, alter an individual's personal identity. Because reasoning about identity changes substantially during adolescence, the current work tested pre- and post-adolescents to reveal the role that such changes could play in moral cognition. Experiment 1 showed that 8- to 10-year-olds, like adults, judged that people would change more after changes to their widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., whether hitting is wrong) than after changes to controversial moral beliefs (e.g., whether telling prosocial lies is wrong). Following up on this basic effect, a second experiment examined whether participants regard all changes to widely shared moral beliefs as equally impactful. Adults, but not children, reported that individuals would change more if their good moral beliefs (e.g., it is not okay to hit) transformed into bad moral beliefs (e.g., it is okay to hit) than if the opposite change occurred. This difference in adults was mediated by perceptions of how much changes to each type of belief would alter friendships. We discuss implications for moral judgment and social cognitive development.
In this review, I propose a new framework for the psychological origins of human cooperation that harnesses evolutionary theories about the two major problems posed by cooperation: generating and distributing benefits. Children develop skills foundational for identifying and creating opportunities for cooperation with others early: Infants and toddlers already possess basic skills to help others and share resources. Yet mechanisms that solve the free-rider problem-critical for sustaining cooperation as a viable strategy-emerge later in development and are more sensitive to the influence of social norms. I review empirical studies with children showing a dissociation in the origins of and developmental change seen in these two sets of processes. In addition, comparative studies of nonhuman apes also highlight important differences between these skills: The ability to generate benefits has evolutionary roots that are shared between humans and nonhuman apes, whereas there is little evidence that other apes exhibit comparable capacities for distributing benefits. I conclude by proposing ways in which this framework can motivate new developmental, comparative, and cross-cultural research about human cooperation. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 69 is January 4, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
List of tables and figures Preface 1. Evolution and communication 2. Intellectuals in pre-literate societies? 3. Literacy, criticism and the growth of knowledge 4. Literacy and classification: on turning the tables 5. What's in a list? 6. Following a formula 7. The recipe, the prescription and the experiment 8. The Grand Dichotomy reconsidered Notes to the text References List of abbreviations Index.
Despite differences in beliefs about the self across cultures and relevant individual differences, recent evidence suggests that people universally believe in a 'true self' that is morally good. We propose that this belief arises from a general tendency: psychological essentialism (PE).
Previous work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit essentialism. An alternative hypothesis, however, is that some beliefs may be perceived as inherited and stable over time-characteristics associated with essentialism. In three studies, we examined two aspects of psychological essentialism regarding three different types of beliefs (religious beliefs, factual beliefs, and opinions) in 8- to 10-year-old children and adults, asking whether beliefs are seen as (a) biologically based and/or (b) stable across time. Both children and adults distinguished among belief types when considering biology; opinions were perceived to be more rooted in biology than were other beliefs. By contrast, fewer consistent differences emerged when children and adults considered stability. For example, both children and adults perceived opinions and factual beliefs to be equally changeable. Finally, although children typically perceived beliefs to be more rooted in biology than adults, more specific patterns across belief types (e.g., perceiving opinions to be more rooted in biology than religious beliefs) remained relatively stable across age groups. Thus, development and social learning may play a larger role in perceptions of the biological component of essentialism than in judgments of particular beliefs. We discuss implications for literatures on essentialism, religious cognition, and social cognitive development.
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time-that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs do appear to play an important role in people's beliefs about persistence. Specifically, people are more likely to judge that the identity of a given entity (e.g., a hypothetical nation) remains the same when its features improve (e.g., the nation becomes more egalitarian) than when its features deteriorate (e.g., the nation becomes more discriminatory). Study 1 provides a basic demonstration of this effect. Study 2 shows that this effect is moderated by individual differences in normative beliefs. Study 3 examines the underlying mechanism, which is the belief that, in general, various entities are essentially good. Study 4 directly manipulates beliefs about essence to show that the positivity bias regarding essences is causally responsible for the effect.
People perceive that if their memories and moral beliefs changed, they would change. We investigated why individuals respond this way. In Study 1, participants judged that identity would change more after changes to memories and widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., about murder) versus preferences and controversial moral beliefs (e.g., about abortion). The extent to which participants judged that changes would affect their relationships predicted identity change (Study 2) and mediated the relationship between type of moral belief and perceived identity change (Study 3). We discuss the role that social relationships play in judgments of identity and highlight implications for psychology and philosophy.
How do criminals communicate with each other? Unlike the rest of us, people planning crimes can't freely advertise their goods and services, nor can they rely on formal institutions to settle disputes and certify quality. They face uniquely intense dilemmas as they grapple with the basic problems of whom to trust, how to make themselves trusted, and how to handle information without being detected by rivals or police. In this book, one of the world's leading scholars of the mafia ranges from ancient Rome to the gangs of modern Japan, from the prisons of Western countries to terrorist and pedophile rings, to explain how despite these constraints, many criminals successfully stay in business.Diego Gambetta shows that as villains balance the lure of criminal reward against the fear of dire punishment, they are inspired to unexpected feats of subtlety and ingenuity in communication. He uncovers the logic of the often bizarre ways in which inveterate and occasional criminals solve their dilemmas, such as why the tattoos and scars etched on a criminal's body function as lines on a professional r sum , why inmates resort to violence to establish their position in the prison pecking order, and why mobsters are partial to nicknames and imitate the behavior they see in mafia movies. Even deliberate self-harm and the disclosure of their crimes are strategically employed by criminals to convey important messages.By deciphering how criminals signal to each other in a lawless universe, this gruesomely entertaining and incisive book provides a quantum leap in our ability to make sense of their actions.
This book takes a hard-science look at the possibility that we humans have the capacity to care for others for their sakes (altruism) rather than simply for our own (egoism). The look is based not on armchair speculation, dramatic cases, or after-the-fact interviews, but on an extensive series of theory-testing laboratory experiments conducted over the past 35 years. Part I details the theory of altruistic motivation that has been the focus of this experimental research. The theory centers on the empathy-altruism hypothesis, which claims that other-oriented feelings of sympathy and compassion for a person in need (empathic concern) produce motivation with the ultimate goal of having that need removed. Antecedents and consequences of empathy-induced altruistic motivation are specified, making the theory empirically testable. Part II offers a comprehensive summary of the research designed to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis, giving particular attention to recent challenges. Overall, the research provides remarkably strong and consistent support for this hypothesis, forcing a tentative conclusion that empathy-induced altruism is within the human repertoire. Part III considers the theoretical and practical implications of this conclusion, suggesting that empathy-induced altruism is a far more pervasive and powerful force in human affairs than has been recognized. Failure to appreciate its importance has handicapped attempts to understand why we humans act as we do and wherein our happiness lies. This failure has also handicapped efforts to promote better interpersonal relations and create a more caring, humane society.
This book seeks to analyze the issue of race in America after the election of Barack Obama. For the author, the U.S. criminal justice system functions can act as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it adheres to the principle of color blindness.
5.4 million Americans-one in every forty voting age adults-are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, one in four black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement-both for election outcomes, and for public policy more generally? This book exposes one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, this analysis informs all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals.
Three studies tested basic assumptions derived from a theoretical model based on the dissociation of automatic and controlled processes involved in prejudice. Study 1 supported the model's assumption that high- and low-prejudice persons are equally knowledgeable of the cultural stereotype. The model suggests that the stereotype is automatically activated in the presence of a member (or some symbolic equivalent) of the stereotyped group and that low-prejudice responses require controlled inhibition of the automatically activated stereotype. Study 2, which examined the effects of automatic stereotype activation on the evaluation of ambiguous stereotype-relevant behaviors performed by a race-unspecified person, suggested that when subjects' ability to consciously monitor stereotype activation is precluded, both high- and low-prejudice subjects produce stereotype-congruent evaluations of ambiguous behaviors. Study 3 examined high- and low-prejudice subjects' responses in a consciously directed thought-listing task. Consistent with the model, only low-prejudice subjects inhibited the automatically activated stereotype-congruent thoughts and replaced them with thoughts reflecting equality and negations of the stereotype. The relation between stereotypes and prejudice and implications for prejudice reduction are discussed.
Dehumanization is a central concept in the study of intergroup relations. Yet although theoretical and methodological advances in subtle, “everyday” dehumanization have progressed rapidly, blatant dehu- manization remains understudied. The present research attempts to refocus theoretical and empirical attention on blatant dehumanization, examining when and why it provides explanatory power beyond subtle dehumanization. To accomplish this, we introduce and validate a blatant measure of dehuman- ization based on the popular depiction of evolutionary progress in the “Ascent of Man.” We compare blatant dehumanization to established conceptualizations of subtle and implicit dehumanization, includ- ing infrahumanization, perceptions of human nature and human uniqueness, and implicit associations between ingroup–outgroup and human–animal concepts. Across 7 studies conducted in 3 countries, we demonstrate that blatant dehumanization is (a) more strongly associated with individual differences in support for hierarchy than subtle or implicit dehumanization, (b) uniquely predictive of numerous consequential attitudes and behaviors toward multiple outgroup targets, (c) predictive above prejudice, and (d) reliable over time. Finally, we show that blatant—but not subtle—dehumanization spikes immedi- ately after incidents of real intergroup violence and strongly predicts support for aggressive actions like torture and retaliatory violence (after the Boston Marathon bombings and Woolwich attacks in England). This research extends theory on the role of dehumanization in intergroup relations and intergroup conflict and provides an intuitive, validated empirical tool to reliably measure blatant dehumanization.
There are large racial disparities in school discipline in the United States, which, for Black students, not only contribute to school failure but also can lay a path toward incarceration. Although the disparities have been well documented, the psychological mechanisms underlying them are unclear. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that such disparities are, in part, driven by racial stereotypes that can lead teachers to escalate their negative responses to Black students over the course of multiple interpersonal (e.g., teacher-to-student) encounters. More generally, we argue that race not only can influence how perceivers interpret a specific behavior, but also can enhance perceivers' detection of behavioral patterns across time. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical benefits of employing this novel approach to stereotyping across a range of real-world settings.
© The Author(s) 2015.
Over the last several decades, proactive policing, in which departments use data on reported crimes to determine where local police officers will target their surveillance, has increased police contact with residents in certain neighborhoods. Drawing on field research conducted over a three-year period (2007–2010) among adult and adolescent African American men in a San Francisco neighborhood with a concentrated poor, Black population, I provide an ethnographic account of routine encounters with the police that structure adolescent boys’ daily lives in potentially significant ways. I build on Erving Goffman's discussion of “patterns of mortification” to describe how typical encounters unfold in the day-to-day lives of young men and consider the implications of such encounters for healthy adolescent development. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "dog," "man," or "intelligence," have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. This book argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. This book argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. It also disputes claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on simple, associative learning strategies, arguing that children's concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. Parents don't explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and beliefs that reflect an essentialist bias. The book synthesizes over fifteen years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified framework and explores the broader lessons that the research imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children's thinking, and the ways in which language influences thought.
Research on implicit person theories shows that people who believe that human attributes are immutable (“entity theorists”) are particularly prone to endorse social stereotypes and to explain them with reference to innate factors. We argue that entity theories belong to a broader set of beliefs that represent differences between people in terms of underlying essences. New measures of three essentialist beliefs (i.e., in the biological basis, discreteness, and informativeness of human attributes) were developed in a pilot study. In the main study, these beliefs were found to covary with entity theories, and to predict the endorsement and innate explanation of stereotypes. Essentialist beliefs predicted stereotype endorsement independently of popular stereotyping-related individual difference measures, and in a way that was not reducible to the effect of entity theories. We propose that research on implicit person theories can be placed within an encompassing framework of psychological essentialism.
Studies in literacy, family, culture and the state: an introduction Preface 1. The word of God 2. The word of mammon 3. The state, the bureau and the file 4. The letter of the law 5. Ruptures and continuities Notes Bibliography Index.
What is the nature of human thought? A long dominant view holds that the mind is a general problem-solving device that approaches all questions in much the same way. Chomsky's theory of language, which revolutionised linguistics, challenged this claim, contending that children are primed to acquire some skills, like language, in a manner largely independent of their ability to solve other sorts of apparently similar mental problems. In recent years researchers in anthropology, psychology, linguistic and neuroscience have examined whether other mental skills are similarly independent. Many have concluded that much of human thought is 'domain-specific'. Thus, the mind is better viewed as a collection of cognitive abilities specialised to handle specific tasks than a general problem solver. This volume introduces a general audience to a domain-specificity perspective, by compiling a collection of essays exploring how several of these cognitive abilities are organised.