A History of Implicit Social Cognition 1
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The Contact Hypothesis Reevaluated1
The Contact Hypothesis Reevaluated1 Elizabeth Levy Paluck2, Seth A. Green3, and Donald P. Green4 Abstract This paper evaluates the state of contact hypothesis research from a policy perspective. Building on Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) influential meta-analysis, we assemble all intergroup contact studies that feature random assignment and delayed outcome measures, of which there are 27 in total, nearly two-thirds of which were published following the original review. We find the evidence from this updated dataset to be consistent with Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) conclusion that contact “typically reduces prejudice." At the same time, our meta-analysis suggests that contact’s effects vary, with interventions directed at ethnic or racial prejudice generating substantially weaker effects. Moreover, our inventory of relevant studies reveals important gaps, most notably the absence of studies addressing adults’ racial or ethnic prejudice, an important limitation for both theory and policy. We also call attention to the lack of research that systematically investigates the scope conditions suggested by Allport (1954) under which contact is most influential. We conclude that these gaps in contact research must be addressed empirically before this hypothesis can reliably guide policy. What we have learned since Pettigrew and Tropp: A 10-year retrospective and update For more than a century, researchers have sought to understand what causes people to harbor and express prejudice against outgroups. Sustained attention to the topic of prejudice reflects the fact that in every era and region, stereotyping, discrimination, and 1 For invaluable research contributions, the authors thank Jason Chin and Kulani Dias. For detailed comments on their meta-analyses, we thank Linda Tropp, Thomas Pettigrew, Gunnar Lemmer, and Ulrich Wagner. -
The Neural Basis of Implicit Attitudes Damian Stanley,1 Elizabeth Phelps,1 and Mahzarin Banaji2
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE The Neural Basis of Implicit Attitudes Damian Stanley,1 Elizabeth Phelps,1 and Mahzarin Banaji2 1New York University and 2Harvard University ABSTRACT—Evidence that human preferences, beliefs, and enable us to rapidly and efficiently react to simple sensory inputs behavior are influenced by sources that are outside the as well as to multifaceted experiences such as individuals, reach of conscious awareness, control, intention, and self- groups, objects, and events we encounter in our social worlds. reflection is incontrovertible. Recent advances in neu- Unlike other organisms, humans have the ability to introspec- roscience have enabled researchers to investigate the tively identify and even change the attitudes they hold. As Max neural basis of these implicit attitudes, particularly atti- Klinger of MnAnSnH said, ‘‘I used to be an atheist, but I gave it up tudes involving social groups. From this research, a model for lent.’’ This ability to examine the contents of our own minds with three identified neural components related to the and manipulate them is uniquely human. Its presence can automatic activation and regulation of implicit attitudes create the illusion that we control more about ourselves and our is beginning to emerge. The amygdala is implicated in the universe than we actually do, and that we know what our pref- automatic evaluation of socially relevant stimuli, while erences are and why we have them. Research in social psy- the anterior cingulate and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices chology has shown that, in addition to our conscious attitudes, are involved in the detection and regulation, respectively, we possess automatically triggered attitudes that can influence of implicit attitudes. -
Psychology, Meaning Making and the Study of Worldviews: Beyond Religion and Non-Religion
Psychology, Meaning Making and the Study of Worldviews: Beyond Religion and Non-Religion Ann Taves, University of California, Santa Barbara Egil Asprem, Stockholm University Elliott Ihm, University of California, Santa Barbara Abstract: To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and non-religions. We advocate a shift from “religions” to “worldviews” and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on “big questions” ([BQs], e.g., what exists? how should we live?). From a worldviews perspective, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are competing claims about one feature of reality and can be combined with various answers to the BQs to generate a wide range of worldviews. To lay a foundation for the multidisciplinary study of worldviews that includes psychology and other sciences, we ground them in humans’ evolved world-making capacities. Conceptualizing worldviews in this way allows us to identify, refine, and connect concepts that are appropriate to different levels of analysis. We argue that the language of enacted and articulated worldviews (for humans) and worldmaking and ways of life (for humans and other animals) is appropriate at the level of persons or organisms and the language of sense making, schemas, and meaning frameworks is appropriate at the cognitive level (for humans and other animals). Viewing the meaning making processes that enable humans to generate worldviews from an evolutionary perspective allows us to raise news questions for psychology with particular relevance for the study of nonreligious worldviews. Keywords: worldviews, meaning making, religion, nonreligion Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Raymond F. -
Back to the Future of Dissonance Theory: Cognitive Consistency As a Core Motive
Social Cognition, Vol. 30, No. 6, 2012, pp. 652–668 GAWRONSKI COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY AS A CORE MOTIVE BACK TO THE FUTURE OF DISSONANCE THEORY: COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY AS A CORE MOTIVE Bertram Gawronski The University of Western Ontario In his theory of cognitive dissonance, Festinger (1957) described cogni- tive consistency as a psychological need that is as basic as hunger and thirst. Over the past decades, however, the idea of cognitive consistency as a core motive has been replaced by an increasingly narrow focus on dissonance-related changes in attitudes and alternative accounts that at- tribute such changes to mechanisms of ego-defense. The current article aims at reviving the idea of cognitive consistency as a core motive, arguing that inconsistency serves as an epistemic cue for errors in one’s system of beliefs. Because inconsistency can often be resolved in multiple ways, motivated reasoning can bias processes of inconsistency resolution toward desired conclusions, although motivated distortions are constrained by the need for cognitive consistency. The ubiquity of consistency processes is il- lustrated through its role in various instances of threat-compensation (e.g., victim derogation, self-verification, system justification) and the insights that can be gained from reconceptualizing various social psychological phenomena in terms of cognitive consistency (e.g., prejudice-related belief systems, dispositional inference, stability of first impressions). Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance is arguably one of the most in- fluential theories in the history of social psychology. The theory postulates that inconsistent cognitions elicit an aversive state of arousal (i.e., dissonance), which in turn produces a desire to reduce the underlying inconsistency and to maintain a state of consonance.1 Although Festinger was convinced that the psychological need for cognitive consistency is as basic as hunger and thirst, several revisions 1. -
Social Cognition and Behavior in Relationship Context
TURUN YLIOPISTON JULKAISUJA ANNALES UNIVERSITATIS TURKUENSIS SARJA - SER. B OSA - TOM. 311 HUMANIORA SOCIAL COGNITION AND BEHAVIOR IN RELATIONSHIP CONTEXT by Kätlin Peets TURUN YLIOPISTO Turku 2008 From the Department of Psychology University of Turku, Finland Supervised by Christina Salmivalli, Ph.D. Professor Department of Psychology University of Turku Finland Ernest V. E. Hodges, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology St. John’s University New York, USA Reviewed by Shelley Hymel, Ph.D. Professor Faculty of Education University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Bram Orobio de Castro, Ph.D. Professor Department of Developmental Psychology Utrecht University Utrecht, The Netherlands Opponent Shelley Hymel, Ph.D. Professor Faculty of Education University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada ISBN 978-951-29-3614-4 (PRINT) ISBN 978-951-29-3615-1 (PDF) ISNN 0082-6987 Painosalama Oy – Turku, Finland 2008 3 Social Cognition and Behavior in Relationship Context Kätlin Peets Department of Psychology University of Turku Finland ABSTRACT Social information processing (SIP; Crick & Dodge, 1994) and social-cognitive learning theories have been often used to understand children’s problem behaviors, such as aggression. According to these theories, children’s thinking guides their subsequent behaviors. Although most of us agree that social behavior and underlying thought processes are context-dependent, personality and social development researchers have usually engaged in searching for stable patterns of dispositions and behaviors, ignoring (or treating as error) the variance across different situations and relationship types. This, however, can result in erroneous conclusions and question the interpretation of previous findings. Four studies were conducted to explore the influence of relationship context on children’s social-cognitive evaluations and behavior. -
A Neglected Aspect of Conscience: Awareness of Implicit Attitudes
Note: this is the pre-refereed draft version. Please find the final published version in Bioethics, Vol: 28:1, pp. 24-32 at DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12058 A neglected aspect of conscience: awareness of implicit attitudes The conception of conscience that dominates discussions in bioethics focuses narrowly on the regulation of behaviour resulting from explicit attitudes and neglects to mention implicit attitudes. But if conscience is a way of ensuring that a person’s behaviour is in line with her moral values, it must be responsive to all aspects of the mind that influence behaviour. There is a wealth of recent psychological work demonstrating the influence of implicit attitudes on behaviour. A necessary part of having a well-functioning conscience must thus be awareness and regulation of one’s implicit attitudes in addition to one’s explicit attitudes and resulting behaviour. On my revised conception of conscience, the ethical training necessary to ensure that health professionals develop and maintain a well- functioning conscience must involve cultivation of awareness of implicit attitudes and techniques to enable better control over them. This could be done through the methods of reflective practice in combination with workshops on implicit attitudes. If the function of conscience is to encourage a person to behave in accordance with her moral values, conscience must be responsive to all aspects of the mind that influence behaviour. Recent empirical work in psychology demonstrates the influence of implicit attitudes on behaviour and also emphasises the need for self-awareness relating to these aspects of one’s mind. Implicit attitudes are attitudes that are below the level of conscious awareness and thus seemingly not subject to direct conscious control nor to rational revision through reflection. -
1 the Psychology of Implicit Intergroup Bias and the Prospect Of
1 The Psychology of Implicit Intergroup Bias and the Prospect of Change Calvin K. Lai1 & Mahzarin R. Banaji2 1 Washington University in St. Louis 2 Harvard University Last updated: June 24, 2020 Correspondence should be addressed to: Calvin Lai at [email protected]. Paper should be cited as: Lai, C. K., & Banaji, M. R. (2020). The psychology of implicit intergroup bias and the prospect of change. In D. Allen & R. Somanathan (Eds.), Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2 1. Introduction Over the course of evolution, human minds acquired the breathtaking quality of consciousness which gave our species the capacity to regulate behavior. Among the consequences of this capacity was the possibility of internal dialogue with oneself about the consistency between one’s intentions and actions. This facility to engage in the daily rituals of deliberative thought and action is so natural to our species that we hardly reflect on it or take stock of how effectively we are achieving the goal of intention-action consistency. We do not routinely ask at the end of each day how many of our actions were consistent with the values so many individuals hold: a belief in freedom and equality for all, in opportunity and access for all, in fairness in treatment and justice for all. Even if we wished to compute the extent to which we succeed at this task, how would we go about doing it? As William James (1904) pointed over a century ago, the difficulty of studying the human mind is that the knower is also the known, and this poses difficulties in accessing, in modestly objective fashion, the data from our own moral ledger. -
Social Cognition Is Not Reducible to Theory of Mind
1 The British Psychological British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2011) Society C 2011 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others ∗ Fabrice Clement´ 1,Stephane´ Bernard2 and Laurence Kaufmann2 1Institute of Language and Communication Sciences, University of Neuchatel,ˆ Switzerland 2Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading. The prevailing trend in developmental, comparative, and evolutionary psychology is to assimilate social inferences to theory of mind, that is, to the capacity to understand others’ behaviours by ascribing to them the beliefs, knowledge, and desires that are supposed to be the hidden causes of their actions. -
Attitude, Inference, Association: on the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias
Attitude, Inference, Association Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias Eric Mandelbaum Department of Philosophy Baruch College, CUNY 17 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10010 Email: [email protected]; [email protected] Phone: 908-770-0378 Homepage: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~mandelbaum/ Keywords: Implicit Bias, Dual Process Theories, Cognitive Architecture, Implicit Attitudes, Unconscious Reasoning, Associative Learning 1 Attitude, Inference, Association Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias Abstract: The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, then implicit biases should be modulated by counterconditioning or extinction but should not be modulated by rational argumentation or logical interventions. This hypothesis is false; implicit biases are not predicated on any associative structures or associative processes but instead arise because of unconscious propositionally structured beliefs. I conclude by discussing how the case study of implicit bias illuminates problems with popular dual process models of cognitive architecture. 2 Attitude, Inference, Association Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias Implicit biases have received much attention, and for good reason: many pernicious and ubiquitous forms of prejudice are perpetuated because of them. A person with a strong implicit bias against African Americans is apt to smile less at them and to cut off conversations with them sooner (McConnell & Leibold 2001). -
Attitudes As Global and Local Action Guides0
ibits. inion tonal New Attitudes as Global and Local Action Guides0 ALISON LEDGERWOOD AND YAACOV THOPE \Ve often th ink of ou r att itudes ami beliefs as stahle personality chamcteristics wllen asked to describe ourselves, we might cite our love of a particular composer, oor support for a long-preferred political party, or perhaps a deep and ahiding hatred of Oreo cookies. Echoing this assumption, attitudes have historically been consid ered relatively stable individual differences that remain consistent across time and contexts, unless or until an overt persuasion attempt is encountered. However, more recently, a far more malleable pictu re of attitudes has clnerged from research sug gesting that evaluations can shift quite flexibly in response to the immed iate social environment (e.g., Baldwin & Holmes, 1987; Kawakami, Dovidio, & Dijksterhui s. 2003; Ledgerwood & Chaiken, 200i; Lowery, Hardin , & Sinclair, 200j ). In this chapter, we propose that these competing conceptualizations of attitudes as stable versus shifting llIay reflect two difTerent roles that attitudes play in regulat ing evaluative responding. On the one hand, att itudes can funct ion to gU ide action with respect to tile current social context. In order to act efTect ively and efficiently in the here and 1I0W , individuals need quick summaries of pertinent information to gUide their interactions with objects and people in the present situation. On the other hand, att itudes can function to guide action at a distance. \Vhen planning behavior in the distant future or making decisions about a faraway location, indi viduals need to he able to efficient ly abstract across the particularities of any one . -
The Link Between Social Cognition and Self-Referential Thought in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex
The Link between Social Cognition and Self-referential Thought in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Jason P. Mitchell1,2, Mahzarin R. Banaji1, and C. Neil Macrae2 Abstract & The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated that inferences based on self-reflection should only be made in seemingly disparate cognitive functions, such as under- for similar others, targets were subsequently rated for their standing the minds of other people and processing informa- degree of similarity to self. Parametric analyses revealed a tion about the self. This functional overlap would be region of the ventral mPFC—previously implicated in self- expected if humans use their own experiences to infer the referencing tasks—in which activity correlated with perceived mental states of others, a basic postulate of simulation theory. self/other similarity, but only for mentalizing trials. These Neural activity was measured while participants attended to results suggest that self-reflection may be used to infer the either the mental or physical aspects of a series of other mental states of others when they are sufficiently similar to people. To permit a test of simulation theory’s prediction self. & INTRODUCTION role that this region plays in the human capacity to Recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological research understand the minds of others. In part, characterization has explored the functional neuroanatomy of social of mPFC functioning has been complicated by the cognition—for instance, by examining brain regions that observation that, together with its role in inferring the subserve an understanding of the psychological proper- mental states of others, this region has also been ties of other people, such as their beliefs, feelings, and associated with tasks that require people to reflect on, personalities. -
Social Psychology Circa 2016: a Field on Steroids
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Jagiellonian Univeristy Repository EJSP AGENDA 2017 Social psychology circa 2016: A field on steroids Arie W. Kruglanski*, Marina Chernikova* & Katarzyna Jasko† * University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA † Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland Correspondence Abstract Arie Kruglanski, University of Maryland, fi College Park, MD 20742, USA. This paper considers the current state of the eld in social psychology. On the E-mail: [email protected] one hand, we have made enormous progress in integrating our research with other disciplines, reaching out to general public and using our knowledge to- ward addressing major societal ills. On the other hand, social psychology has been recently mired in a crisis of confidence concerning the appropriateness http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2285 of our methods and the robustness of our findings. We propose that shifting our attention to theory, method, and application, as well as away from a per- Keywords: social psychology, crisis, vision, vasive “outcome focus,” can extricate social psychology from its current dol- state of the field drums and allow it to realize its potential as an indispensable social science. These days, to be a social psychologist is to likely experi- General, Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, Memory, American ence a bundle of conflicting emotions, pride and a sense Psychologist, Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, of accomplishment, admixed with anxiety and fear; and Science, Nature, Psychological Science, Behavioral & Brain excitement about our potential alongside insecurity Sciences, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about our future.