Think Difference
Shared Demographic Characteristics Do Not Reliably Facilitate Persuasion in Interpersonal Conversations: Evidence from Eight Experiments
David Broockman et al.
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many efforts to persuade others politically employ interpersonal conversations. A recurring question is whether the participants in such conversations are more readily persuaded by others who share their demographic characteristics. Echoing concerns that individuals have difficulties communicating across differences, research finds that individuals perceive demographically similar people as more trustworthy, suggesting shared demographics could facilitate persuasion. In a survey of practitioners and scholars, we find many share these expectations. However, dual-process theories suggest that messenger attributes are typically peripheral cues that should not influence persuasion when individuals are effortfully thinking, such as during interpersonal conversations. Supporting this view, we analyze data from eight experiments on interpersonal conversations across four topics (total N = 6, 139) and find that shared demographics (age, gender, or race) do not meaningfully increase their effects. These results are encouraging for the scalability of conversation interventions, and suggest voters can persuade each other across differences.
Black racial phenotypicality: Implications for the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
Maire O'Hagan, Samantha Pejic & Jason Deska
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2025
Abstract:
Black individuals with phenotypically African features tend to experience heightened discrimination and mistreatment. The current research examined how racial phenotypicality and prototypicality affect hate crime reporting metrics and who is seen as more represented by #BlackLivesMatter. Across five studies (N = 876), results indicate that, compared to low racially phenotypic Black targets, high phenotypic targets were seen as more represented by #BlackLivesMatter (Study 1). When depicted as being the victim of a hate crime, high phenotypic targets were deemed more credible and that it was more appropriate for them to report their victimization on the #BlackLivesMatter website compared to their low phenotypic counterparts by White (Study 2a and 2c) and Black participants (Study 2b and 2c). Black (Study 2b and 2c) and White (Study 3) participants showed differences in perceptions of harm following hate crime victimization. Study 3 extended these findings to a separate manipulation of prototypicality and used a more ecologically valid context. These findings provide support for the problematic exclusivity of narrow prototypes by demonstrating their effect on beliefs about who social justice movements represent, and how they influence beliefs about victim reporting metrics.
Social Movements in the Commercial Public Sphere: How Women's Magazines Popularized Second-Wave Feminism
Francesca Polletta et al.
American Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social movements have impact by getting their issues into the public sphere, but scholars have conceptualized the public sphere narrowly, focusing on how movements are covered in the news. Movements appear also in film, television, and other popular cultural forms, however, and in ways that variously amplify, dilute, or transform their claims. We argue that movements' representation in the public sphere owes less to producers' personal ideological commitments than to industry norms for providing content to imagined audiences. To make this argument, we reexamine the popular women's magazines that have been seen as promoting a cult of domesticity against which second-wave feminists struggled. Our comparison of the movement's representation in five women's magazines and the New York Times shows that, for entirely commercial reasons, women's magazines encouraged their more than 50 million readers to care about inequality, not only in the workplace but also in the home. More than feminism in the news, popular cultural feminism helped liberalize gender attitudes.
(In)stability in American public attitudes toward Jews: A panel analysis
Jeffrey Cohen
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Polls for the past several decades indicate high regard for Jews in democracies in Western Europe and North American. We however have a limited understanding of the properties underlying those poll responses, for instance whether response bias or nonattitudes account for those results. The nonattitudes perspective suggests that respondents' survey answers to questions about Jews are not true attitudes. Nonattitudes are weakly held responses to survey questions, and tend to be unstable over time, reflecting random as opposed to systematic change. This paper uses panel data from Voter Study Group surveys to test for individual-level stability in attitudes toward Jews by non-Jews in the United States in the 2010s to assess whether such attitudes are true or nonattitudes. Results suggest considerable instability especially when compared to attitudes toward Muslims, Democrats, and Republicans, suggesting a high degree of nonattitudes in non-Jews attitudes toward Jews. The conclusion offers reasons that might account for this instability in attitudes toward Jews and implications for the continuation of positive regard for Jews in western democracies.
The directed nature of social stereotypes
Oliver Sng et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stereotypes are strategically complex. We propose that people hold not just stereotypes about what groups are generally like (e.g., "men are competitive") but stereotypes about how groups behave toward specific groups (e.g., "men are competitive toward")-what we call directed stereotypes. Across studies, we find that perceivers indeed hold directed stereotypes. Four studies examine directed stereotypes of sex and age (Studies 1 and 2; N = 541) and of race/ethnicity (of Asian/Black/Latino/White Americans; Studies 3 and 4; N = 769), with a focus on stereotypes of competitiveness, aggressiveness, cooperativeness, and communion. Across studies, directed stereotypes present unique patterns that both qualify and reverse well-documented stereotype patterns in the literature. For example, men are typically stereotyped as more competitive than women. However, directed stereotypes show that women are stereotyped to be more competitive than men, when this competitiveness is directed toward young women. Multiple such patterns emerge in the current data, across sex, age, and racial/ethnic stereotypes. Directed stereotypes also uniquely predict intergroup attitudes, over and above general stereotypes (Study 4). The idea of directed stereotypes is compatible with multiple theoretical perspectives and intuitive. However, they have been unexamined. We discuss the implications of the current work for thinking about the nature and measurement of social stereotypes, stereotype content, and social perception more broadly.
Top-down racial biases in size perception: A registered replication and extension of Wilson et al. (2017)
Mayan Navon, Niv Reggev & Tal Moran
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2025
Abstract:
Biases in the perception and judgment of members of race-based and ethnicity-based minority groups are prevalent, often resulting in detrimental outcomes for these individuals. One such bias is a threat-related stereotype, associating specific race and ethnicity-based social groups with aggressiveness, violence, and criminality. In the US context, Black men are often victims of such bias. Recent evidence suggests that threat-related stereotypes are also linked to biased perceptions, such that perceivers overestimate the body size of Black relative to White men, even in the absence of perceptual differences between them. That is, mere top-down social category information was sufficient to induce perceptual biases in size perception related to threat (Wilson et al., 2017, Study 7). Considering the novelty of this finding and its theoretical importance, we suggested a registered replication of this finding to assess its robustness across laboratories, participants, and social groups. We conducted a direct replication (Study 1, N = 280) of the effect reported by Wilson and colleagues, followed by a conceptual replication (Study 2, N = 280) that tested the generalization of the original findings to another population (Israeli residents) and a different target social group (Muslim Israelis) frequently stereotyped as threatening in this population. Participants did not overestimate the body size of Black or Muslim Israeli targets, pointing to a failed replication of the original effect. These findings suggest that the effects of purely top-down social category information on threat-related perception and judgment are less robust than previously assumed.
The minority-groups homogeneity effect: Seeing members of different minority groups as more similar to each other than members of the majority
Stephanie Tepper & Thomas Gilovich
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The widely documented "outgroup homogeneity effect" refers to people's tendency to view members of groups to which they do not belong (outgroups) as more similar to one another than members of their own groups (ingroups). Here, we present evidence for a novel but related phenomenon: People tend to view members of different minority groups as collectively more similar to one another than members of the majority group are to one another. Across nine studies (and four studies reported in the Supplemental Materials), we demonstrate a robust "minority-groups homogeneity effect" among participants from both majority groups (Studies 1-5) and minority groups (Studies 6-8), albeit less consistently among the latter. We provide experimental support for the role of beliefs in the common fate of minorities in driving this effect: When participants are led to believe that minority groups do not share a common fate, they no longer rate them as more similar than the majority (Study 9). These studies shed light on a broad pattern of social perception that may influence how members of different groups interact with one another and how they respond to cultural and demographic changes in society.
Racial Inequity in Donation-based Crowdfunding Platforms: The Role of Facial Emotional Expressiveness
Elham Yazdani, Anindita Chakravarty & Jeffrey Inman
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Donation-based crowdfunding platforms often claim to pursue equitable outcomes for all beneficiaries, yet many face criticism for failing to do so across different demographic profiles. In response, platform managers are eager to understand how these inequities emerge and explore solutions to address them. In this research, we show that the degree of facial emotional expressiveness of beneficiaries in uploaded images can differentially impact donation amounts for White vs Black beneficiaries. Drawing on social vision theory, we propose that facial emotional expressiveness in images combined with the race of the faces activates racial stereotypes of emotion expression that result in differential donation amounts to Black and White individuals. Analyzing a sample of 4,153 campaigns from GoFundMe between June 2021 and September 2022, along with a follow-up experiment, we find that higher facial emotional expressiveness is associated with significantly lower donation amounts for Black compared to White beneficiaries. Further exploring our moderating constructs reveals that the use of call-to-action cues, affective messaging, and race-gender homophily cues can attenuate the activation of stereotypes and therefore reduce differences in donation amounts between racial groups. Based on these findings, we offer targeted recommendations for platform managers to help reduce racial inequities in crowdfunding outcomes.