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Accusations of discriminatory treatment of minority persons in the criminal justice system create a need for policy and procedure development to create real and perceived equal treatment. A facial recognition deficit among law enforcement officers and witnesses for persons of another “race” contributes to unequal treatment of minority group members. This article demonstrates the other-race effect in an unusual context, reveals theoretical weaknesses, reveals the role of categorical processes in the phenomenon, and discusses policy implications. Experiment 1, based on feature and trait ratings, demonstrates that identical and racially ambiguous faces with different racial markers (hair) are perceived according to the marker. Experiment 2 demonstrates an other-race recognition effect using these faces. A feature acting as a racial marker can cause a face to be perceived and remembered differently. Other-race faces are perceived categorically, which drives the recognition process.
This article analyzes migrant narratives on masculinity through an intersectional perspective that is sensitive to spatial aspects. Drawing on research with migrants in Berlin and Munich in Germany, we unpack how (self-identified) Polish men negotiate their gender identity vis-à-vis other people in these cities whom they perceive as ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual others. We address how their social and ethnic backgrounds shape their narratives on foreign masculinities and femininities at the intersections of ethnicity and gender. In particular, we draw attention to how these negotiations are entangled with local discourses over the presence and visibility of various immigrant groups and cosmopolitan queer communities in the cities. The intersectional approach helps us to formulate how migrant masculine identities change in migration.
Lack of clarity and questionable congruence between researcher and participant understandings of ethnicity and race challenge the validity and impact of research utilizing these concepts. We aimed to both elucidate the multiple meanings that research participants in the United States might bring to questions about ethnicity and race and examine their relation to formal conceptualizations of these variables. We used consensual qualitative research-modified analyses to conduct thematic content analysis of 151 responses to open-ended survey questions about meanings of ethnicity and race. Participants included a racially diverse sample of 53 males, 87 females, and 11 unidentified gender with a mean age of 28.71 years. Results indicated that the most frequent colloquial meanings of ethnicity included origin, culture, ancestry, related or similar to race, social similarity, religion, and identity. The most frequent colloquial meanings of race included physical characteristics, ethnicity, origin, social grouping, ancestry, and imposed categorization. Results also illustrated how participants approached defining ethnicity and race. Results support the acknowledged and critiqued colloquial confounding of ethnicity and race and indicate a lack of agreed upon meaning between lay representations/meanings and formal meanings used by social scientists. This incongruence threatens valid operationalizations for research and challenges our ability to use these concepts in interventions to promote social justice and psychological health.
This article examines how intersecting markers of difference shape differentiated whiteness. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on whiteness and racialization. The authors draw on autoethnographic vignettes from fieldwork in Copenhagen to analyse the emergence of similar-yet-divergent researcher and migrant positionalities. Both authors are female researchers from Baltic countries living in Denmark and often perceived as Eastern Europeans—as not-quite-white and as “Europe’s ‘internal others’”. Both of us conducted fieldwork in the same district of Copenhagen. Mantė carried out research on friendships among teenagersn a racially diverse public school and in youth activity clubs. Linda explored social inclusion and exclusion in contested urban spaces. However, our researcher positionalities played out differently. We analyse how ambiguous, contested and relational notions of (Eastern) Europeanness, together with intersecting racialized, classed and gendered tropes of Eastern European migration, made themselves manifest in our positionings and movements. Through an intersectional analysis of Eastern European racialized positionalities, our discussion of differentiated whiteness highlights how whiteness is intersectionally constituted, multiple and mouldable. These findings serve to nuance research on hegemonic whiteness in the Nordic setting.
Historically, minority status has been linked with visibility as a non-White person, and such phenotypical visibility has marked people in terms of racial stigmas and discrimination. But definitions and claims to minority status are increasingly complicated (and contested) by immigration and the growth of multiracial people, many of whom are racially ambiguous, and some of whom look White. As the multiracial population in various multi-ethnic societies continues to grow, and diversify, to include multigeneration multiracial people whose non-White ancestries are more distant, questions about recognized minority status will become more pressing. Do we need to rethink the link between minority status and visibility as a non-White person? To what extent should lived experience (as a multiracial person) matter for our understandings of minority status, if one is not a ‘visible’ minority?
Stereotyping plays an important role in how we perceive the members of social groups. Yet stereotyping is complicated by the fact that every individual simultaneously belongs to multiple social groups. For example, the stereotypes that are called to mind about a Black individual can vary depending on that person’s age, gender, and sexual orientation. This phenomenon—termed intersectional stereotyping—has recently inspired a variety of intriguing research findings. But these research findings pose challenges for prevalent theories of stereotyping. These prevalent theories tend to argue either that a) perceivers inevitably attend to certain social identities (e.g., gender) when stereotyping intersectional targets, or that b) perceivers inevitably attend to all detectable social identities at once. In contrast to these perspectives, we argue that perceivers generally attend to just one social identity (or one intersection of identities) at a time when stereotyping intersectional targets, as a function of the social context. For example, gay Black men can be alternately stereotyped as gay people, as Black people, as men, or as gay Black men specifically. The approach described here can account for a diverse array of findings emerging from research on intersectional stereotyping. Moreover, by specifying the factors that render particular identities salient in the minds of social perceivers, this approach offers clear and falsifiable predictions regarding the situated stereotyping of multifaceted individuals.
Utilizing interview data with thirty-seven British people of Mixed White and Black Caribbean heritage, this paper draws upon the concept of “horizontal hostility” to describe how Black mixed-race experiences of Black rejection impact on self-perceptions and expressed ethnic identities. In demonstrating the effects of being excluded from a relatable collective Black identity, the paper argues that horizontal hostility is critical in the project of theorizing mixed-race. Experiences of horizontal hostility represent significant turning points in mixed-race lives as they can prompt reconsiderations of mixed-race positionings within the broader Black imagined space. Beyond the benefits that horizontal hostility offers to mixed-race studies, it provides insights into conceptualisations of Blackness – as a collective racial identity, community and politics. The article unpacks how, when and why its boundaries are policed, adding to debates relating to the future formation and maintenance of ethnic group identities and categories more generally.
This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mechanisms by which cultural processes enter into individual minds, this volume brings together prominent scholars from sociology and other disciplines to feature the key tensions, debates, and directions in the field. The volume is organized into seven parts. The first three parts are organized around general theoretical, interdisciplinary, and methodological contributions. Part I addresses theoretical foundations that forge cognitive sociology and its relationships to cultural sociology and to cognitive science. Part II emphasizes perspectives from other fields that inform an interdisciplinary cognitive social science. Part III highlights methodological developments in cognitive sociological analysis. The next four parts focus on employing cognitive sociology to examine the sociocultural organization of specific cognitive processes. Part IV analyzes the sociology of perception and attention. Part V explores the sociocultural framing of meaning through oppositions, language, analogies, and metaphor. Part VI looks at the social construction of categories, boundaries, and identities. Part VII examines collective experiences of time and memory.
A strong claim, often found in the literature, is that it is impossible to categorize perceptual properties unless one possesses the related concepts. The evidence from visual perception reviewed in this paper however questions this claim: Concepts, at least canonically defined, are ill-suited to explain perceptual categorisation, which is a fast, and crucially a largely involuntary and unconscious process, which rests on quickly updated probabilistic calculations. I suggest here that perceptual categorisation rests on non-conceptual sorting principles. This changes the claim that categorisation cannot occur without concepts: It does not preclude that the concepts remain necessary for categorisation, but opens the possibility that they are not and that those sorting principles could be here sufficient.
Abstract This paper investigates effects of appearance and religious practice of job applicants on the hiring decision. We asked participants in our laboratory experiment to select fictitious candidates for an interview from a pool of CVs with comparable characteristics but different photos. Some photos were of the same Turkish women with and without a headscarf. We demonstrate the effects of appearance, ethnicity, and veiling simultaneously and propose underlying mechanisms. We find robust effects of appearance but heterogeneous effects of headscarf on callback rates based on types of occupations and recruiters’ characteristics. However, positive characteristics mitigate discrimination against headscarf and even reverse it.
This chapter* explores the relationship between masculinity, migration-related issues and super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007), with Polish migrants in the UK as a case study. The research question refers to how being a man shapes the migratory experience of migrants who come from a considerably more conservative and patriarchal society and now live in a super-diverse society, i.e. complex, multiethnic, liberal etc. In this chapter I investigate the content of selected migrationrelated internet forum discussions among Polish migrants in the UK to see what aspects of living in Britain are discussed and how they are viewed, interpreted and constructed in a discursive practice by the male internet users. I am interested in the response of male internet forum users to the challenges of living in a super diverse socio-cultural environment and how this relates to gender construction.
I argue that masculinities, understood as configurations of practice realised in social actions, offer a potential angle to understand how Polish men adapt to and appreciate life in Britain. I apply the concept of hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic bargain to understand the process of ‘doing gender’ in a migratory context. Gender norms, importance of the nation, whiteness and sense of patriotism are identified as issues that are strongly connected with the gender identity of some male forum users and the migratory context. It also seems that the internet forums and, more broadly, social media offer a space of considerable significance. The internet enables forum users to strengthen the ethnic bonds with those in and out of the country. Cyber space offers the platform to vent their views openly, to discuss and to argue on matters that often cannot be understood by the host society or would not be accepted.
Despite the increased visibility and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, sexual minorities continue to face prejudice and discrimination in many domains. Past research has shown that this prejudice is more prevalent among those holding conservative political views. In two studies, we merge strategic essentialism and motivated ideology theoretical perspectives to empirically investigate the link between political orientation and sexual prejudice. More specifically, we examine how conservatives strategically use different forms of essentialism to support their views of gay individuals and their reactions to messages aimed at changing essentializing beliefs. In Study 1 (N = 220), we demonstrate that conservatives endorse social essentialism (i.e., the belief that gay and straight people are fundamentally different from each other) more than liberals do. In turn, they blame gay individuals more for their sexual orientation and show more prejudice toward them. At the same time, conservatives endorse trait essentialism (i.e., the belief that sexual orientation is a fixed attribute that cannot be changed) less than liberals do, which in turn predicts greater levels of blame and prejudice for conservatives relative to liberals. In Study 2 (N = 217), we additionally show that conservatives, but not liberals, are resistant to messages aimed at increasing trait essentialism and reducing prejudice toward sexual minorities. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
Recent models suggest that social categories are not perceived independently, but that they can facilitate or bias each other's perception due to incidentally shared stereotypes. To address the role of visual prediction in driving these intersectional effects in the domains of sex and emotion perception, three studies were conducted. Participants categorized visually obscured faces by sex and emotion, from which we produced reversecorrelated prototype faces for each social category. These prototype faces were found to exhibit systematic biases in their visual appearance (Male- Angry, Female-Happy), as judged by independent raters. Moreover, this biased appearance in sex and emotion prototypes was related to the extent of a participant's stereotypical associations linking men to anger and women to happiness. Together, the findings suggest that stereotypes can bind social categories together at the level of visual prediction and offer new insights into current theoretical models of social perception.
The growing multiracial population and the emergent body of research examining how we categorize this population highlights the complexity and malleability inherent in racial categorization. Few studies, however, have examined how categorization of multiracial targets as biracial (rather than a presumed monoracial category) differs across different geographic contexts or how perceivers categorize multiracial minority targets (i.e., those who are not part White). Here, we examined malleability in racial categorizations of Black-White, Asian-White, and Asian-Black faces across two geographic contexts: Hawai'i and California. We found that perceivers (in Hawai'i in Study 1; in both contexts in Study 2) categorized Black-White faces most often as biracial, followed by Asian-Black faces, and then Asian-White faces. Moreover, those who lived in a geographic context with a large biracial population (Hawai'i) categorized multiracial targets as biracial more often than those who lived in a majority White context (California).
A perennial concern in frame analysis is explaining how frames structure perception and persuade audiences. In this article, we suggest that the distinction between personal culture and public culture offers a productive way forward. We propose an approach centered on an analytic contrast between schemas, which we define as a form of personal culture, and frames, which we define as a form of public culture. We develop an “evocation model” of the structure and function of frames. In the model, frames are conceived as material assemblages that activate a network of schemas, thereby evoking a response when people are exposed to them. We discuss how the proposed model extends, and clarifies, extant approaches, and consider new directions for future research.
This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mechanisms by which cultural processes enter into individual minds, this volume brings together prominent scholars from sociology and other disciplines to feature the key tensions, debates, and directions in the field. The volume is organized into seven parts. The first three parts are organized around general theoretical, interdisciplinary, and methodological contributions. Part I addresses theoretical foundations that forge cognitive sociology and its relationships to cultural sociology and to cognitive science. Part II emphasizes perspectives from other fields that inform an interdisciplinary cognitive social science. Part III highlights methodological developments in cognitive sociological analysis. The next four parts focus on employing cognitive sociology to examine the sociocultural organization of specific cognitive processes. Part IV analyzes the sociology of perception and attention. Part V explores the sociocultural framing of meaning through oppositions, language, analogies, and metaphor. Part VI looks at the social construction of categories, boundaries, and identities. Part VII examines collective experiences of time and memory.
New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the study of concepts.
The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have blossomed, with researchers from an ever broader range of disciplines making important contributions. In this volume, leading philosophers and cognitive scientists offer original essays that present the state-of-the-art in the study of concepts. These essays, all commissioned for this book, do not merely present the usual surveys and overviews; rather, they offer the latest work on concepts by a diverse group of theorists as well as discussions of the ideas that should guide research over the next decade. The book is an essential companion volume to the earlier Concepts: Core Readings, the definitive source for classic texts on the nature of concepts.
The essays cover concepts as they relate to animal cognition, the brain, evolution, perception, and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptual individuation. The contributors include such prominent scholars as Susan Carey, Nicola Clayton, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Medin, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Anna Wierzbicka.
ContributorsAurore Avarguès-Weber, Eef Ameel, Megan Bang, H. Clark Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Elisabeth Camp, Susan Carey, Daniel Casasanto, Nicola S. Clayton, Dorothy L. Cheney, Vyvyan Evans, Jerry A. Fodor, Silvia Gennari, Tobias Gerstenberg, Martin Giurfa, Noah D. Goodman, J. Kiley Hamlin, James A. Hampton, Mutsumi Imai, Charles W. Kalish, Frank Keil, Jonathan Kominsky, Stephen Laurence, Gary Lupyan, Edouard Machery, Bradford Z. Mahon, Asifa Majid, Barbara C. Malt, Eric Margolis, Douglas Medin, Nancy J. Nersessian, bethany ojalehto, Anna Papafragou, Joshua M. Plotnik, Noburo Saji, Robert M. Seyfarth, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Sandra Waxman, Daniel A. Weiskopf, Anna Wierzbicka
Was ist darunter zu verstehen, wenn von einem Aufeinandertreffen der Kulturen die Rede ist? Was genau wird postuliert, wenn von »Kosmopolitisierung«, »Amalgamierung« oder »Hybridisierung« der Kulturen die Rede ist? Zur Beantwortung dieser und ähnlicher Fragestellungen wird hier das Phänomen der »kulturellen Differenz« ausgehend von empirischen Erkenntnissen grundlagentheoretisch reflektiert. Das Problem der kulturellen Differenz wird von der Konstitution des subjektiven Bewusstseins und den praktischen Problemen intersubjektiven Verstehens her aufgerollt. Vorgestellt werden materiale Analysen zur Herausbildung »kultureller Differenz«, deren Erkenntnisse sozialtheoretisch gedeutet werden können.
While there has been significant growth in studies of “multiracial,” or “mixed-race,” individuals, very few have investigated the experiences of the descendants of multiracial individuals—the so-called multigeneration multiracials. As interracial unions and disparate types of multiracial people continue to increase in many societies, what effect does this have on our understanding of racial categories and boundaries? How do multiracial people think about race in relation to themselves and their children? Using in-depth interviews, this book investigates how and why multiracial people racially identify and raise their children in particular ways, as well as their attitudes toward the transmission of minority ancestries to their children. Delving into parents’ concerns about racism and the strategies they use to address it with their children, the book also explores their thoughts about their children’s futures in a society in which mixing and mixed-race people are increasingly part of the mainstream.
Similarity and analogy are fundamental in human cognition. They are crucial for recognition and classification, and have been associated with scientific discovery and creativity. Successful learning is generally less dependent on the memorization of isolated facts and abstract rules than it is on the ability to identify relevant bodies of knowledge already stored as the starting point for new learning. Similarity and analogy play an important role in this process - a role that in recent years has received much attention from cognitive scientists. Any adequate understanding of similarity and analogy requires the integration of theory and data from diverse domains. This interdisciplinary volume explores current developments in research and theory from psychological, computational, and educational perspectives, and considers their implications for learning and instruction. Well-known cognitive scientists examine the psychological processes involved in reasoning by similarity and analogy, the computational problems encountered in simulating analogical processing in problem solving, and the conditions promoting the application of analogical reasoning in everyday situations.
Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
Despite legal classification as White, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans experience high levels of discrimination , suggesting low social status precludes them from accessing the White racial category. After first demonstrating that the rated Whiteness of MENA Americans influences support for discriminatory policies (Study 1), the present research explores ratings and perceptions of Whiteness of MENA Americans by demonstrating how MENA ethnicities shift racial categorization of prototypically White and racially ambiguous targets (Studies 2-4), and how MENA Americans' social status influences rated Whiteness (Study 5). As few studies have explored the relative Whiteness of different ethnicities in the United States despite the fluid history of the White racial category, the present studies have implications for the processes that inform White categorization and lay categorizations of MENA Americans.
This article explores the concept of “whiteness” going beyond skin colour to look at its socio-economic and cultural components in the case of intra-EU Romanian migration to two different national/local contexts. Romanian migrants face widespread public demonizing and discrimination in Western Europe, with political campaigns against them focusing more on the job market in the case of the UK and the presence of the Roma minority in France. The analysis is based on qualitative research done around 2012–2016, at the height of anti-Romanian migration sentiment in the EU, and specifically on in-depth interviews conducted with 76 participants (migrants and key informants) in London and Paris. Following studies of the racialization of Eastern European migrants in Western Europe, this article exposes how in London, Romanians’ inclusion/exclusion in the white space is experienced mostly in occupational and economic terms, while in Paris ethnicity and other cultural markers gain greater weight.
Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power.
Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them.
Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood.
After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.
Bradford Books imprint
The neighborhoods that people live in contain a variety of features that color their everyday psychological experience. Whether they feel welcomed by their neighbors, the type of schools they can send their children to, and whether they can find a local job that pays them enough to afford a safe, comfortable home are all examples of ever-present factors that can influence people’s perception of the world and their place in it. Previous work has explored the degree to which individual characteristics, such as personal beliefs and social networks, are associated with judgments about whether society is fair and just. Here, we build upon this work by investigating if these judgments are also associated with the features of the neighborhoods that people live in. Specifically, we hypothesize that neighborhood diversity and socioeconomic indicators will relate to individual beliefs about fairness and social order. We test this hypothesis using two large, open datasets – the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences study data, and the Opportunity Insights Neighborhood Characteristics by County data – and through multi-method modeling techniques. Our work can inform theories of individual perception of, and response to, societal inequity, as well as models of public opinion of social welfare policy.
Purpose
This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies – is racism free or, on the contrary, is affected by racial biases and/or racist prejudices, thus reinforcing overall racial discrimination.
Design/methodology/approach
The study investigates the causal pathways through which face recognition technology may reinforce the racial disproportion in enforcement; it also inquires whether it further discriminates black people by making them experience more racial discrimination and self-identify more decisively as black – two conditions that are shown to be harmful in various respects.
Findings
This study shows that face recognition technology, as it is produced, implemented and used in Western societies, reinforces existing racial disparities in stop, investigation, arrest and incarceration rates because of racist prejudices and even contributes to strengthen the unhealthy effects of racism on historically disadvantaged racial groups, like black people.
Practical implications
The findings hope to make law enforcement agencies and software companies aware that they must take adequate action against the racially discriminative effects of the use of face recognition technology.
Social implications
This study highlights that no implementation of an allegedly racism-free biometric technology is safe from the risk of racially discriminating, simply because each implementation leans against our society, which is affected by racism in many persisting ways.
Originality/value
While the ethical survey of biometric technologies is traditionally framed in the discourse of universal rights, this study explores an issue that has not been deeply scrutinized so far, that is, how face recognition technology differently affects distinct racial groups and how it contributes to racial discrimination.
We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories that frame their action, self-understanding, and life options. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? To answer these questions is to offer a metaphysics of social categories, and that is the project of Categories We Live By . The key component in the story offered is a theory of what it is for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful in a context. People have a myriad of features, but only some of them make a difference socially in the contexts people travel. The author gives an account of what it is for a feature of an individual to matter socially in a given context. This the author does by introducing a conferralist framework to carve out a theory of social meaning, and then uses the framework to offer a theory of social construction, and of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories. Accompanying is also a theory of social identity that brings out the role of individual agency in the formation and maintenance of social categories.
The number of students in England registered as speaking the languages of Eastern, and Central Europe has grown significantly in the past decade, but these migrants’ educational experiences remain under-researched. This study, based on interviews with students, parents and teachers in four secondary schools in London and in the East of England, found that Eastern European students experience various forms of racism and low expectations from teachers. Using a framework influenced by Critical Race Theory and critical conceptions of whiteness, we argue that these students occupy a position of marginal whiteness, related to their linguistic Otherness. However, as the parents we interviewed were aware, the students do benefit from whiteness if they speak English without an accent so that they are not perceived as ‘foreign’.
Research shows that non-focal, yet relevant, social categories (i.e., sex when Asian men are categorized by race) are activated during person construal. However, it is unclear whether non-focal category activation impedes initial categorization, and whether target and perceiver identities modulate person construal involving multiple categories. In two studies, participants completed a modified Implicit Association Test (IAT) in which they categorized White and Asian, male and female targets by race and sex when categorization options were single (man or woman) or intersectional/yoked (White woman or Asian man). The results revealed slower response latencies for all targets when categorization options were intersectional, suggesting that non-focal category activation impedes initial categorization. Study 2 results further revealed that White and Asian participants alike were less efficient when categorizing targets by intersectional versus single options. Implications for social-cognitive processes, such as person memory and stereotyping, are discussed.
People belong to multiple social groups, and the meaning of these groups to others shifts as nonverbal, emotional, and other contextual cues in the environment also change. As such, social categories are both intersectional-in that the overlapping nature of categories affects how a person is perceived-and dynamic-in that perceivers continuously monitor and update their category-based perceptions in light of new information. Yet, social-cognitive research has often treated social categories as independent and fixed. In contrast, the studies in this special issue acknowledge the intersectional and dynamic nature of social categories. Seven articles examine how perceivers categorize targets according to their multiple social identities and, subsequently, how stereotypes are shaped by overlapping and shifting social categories. As such, the articles in this issue reveal social processes that may be otherwise obscured when identities are treated in research as independent and fixed rather than as intersectional and dynamic.
This article discusses findings of a qualitative study on strategies of othering observed in anti-immigrant discourse, by analysing selected examples from the UK and Polish media, together with data collected from interviews with migrants. The purpose is to identify discursive strategies of othering, which aim to categorise, denigrate, oppress and ultimately reject the stigmatised or racialised ‘other’. We do not offer a systematic comparison of the data from the UK and Poland; instead, we are interested in what is common in the discursive practices of these two countries/contexts. In using newspaper together with interview data, we are combining representation and experience in identifying not only strategies of othering, but also how these are perceived by and affect the othered individuals. The paper uses the following data: 40 newspaper articles – 20 from the UK and 20 from Poland, and 19 interviews – 12 from Poland and 7 from the UK. The analysis that follows identifies five shared strategies of othering: a) Stereotyping; b) Whiteness as the norm; c) Racialisation; d) Objectification; e) Wrongly Ascribed Ethnicity. We conclude with the research limitations and outlining possible next stages, such as working with a larger corpus, investigating frequency, or including other media genres.