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Chapter 18 - Group-Motivated Sampling
- from Part V - Sampling as a Tool in Social Environments
- Edited by Klaus Fiedler, Universität Heidelberg, Peter Juslin, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, Jerker Denrell, University of Warwick
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- Book:
- Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
- Published online:
- 01 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2023, pp 417-435
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Summary
Social interactions provide a large proportion of the information that people gather on a daily basis. The fundamental question guiding this chapter is whether and how social motivations influence the samples people gather, and how this drives downstream evaluative biases. We begin by highlighting how group-based motivations may influence three different stages of information processing: (1) where and how much information people gather, (2) how people interpret sampled information, and (3) how sampling strategies change recursively over time based on the congeniality of the environment. We then review recent empirical work that tests these possibilities using different social identities and contexts. Across seven studies we found that most participants began sampling from their own group, and that they sampled overall more information from their own group, giving rise to more variable ingroup (relative to outgroup) experiences. We also found that participants asymmetrically integrated their initial experiences into their evaluations based on congeniality: initial positive experiences were integrated into evaluations, whereas initial negative experiences were not. Lastly, we demonstrated that participants adopted different sampling strategies over time when the ingroup was de facto worse, obfuscating real-group differences. Together, we demonstrate that group-based motivations permeate each stage of information sampling, collectively giving rise to biased evaluations. These results unite extant research on sampling and interpretive sources of bias and provide a springboard for future research on sampling behavior across social motivations and contexts.
19 - Generalized Prejudice: Old Wisdom and New Perspectives
- from Part II - Prejudice in Specific Domains
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- By Robin Bergh, Harvard University, Nazar Akrami, Uppsala University
- Edited by Chris G. Sibley, University of Auckland, Fiona Kate Barlow, University of Queensland
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice
- Published online:
- 17 November 2016
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2016, pp 438-460
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Summary
Some individuals seem to carry prejudice with them, from context to context, from attitudes toward one group to attitudes toward other, seemingly unrelated, groups. This reveals itself in correlations between different kinds of prejudice, for example, against Jews and old people. This observation also represents one of the oldest lessons in the prejudice literature (Allport, 1954; Hartley, 1946). What is perhaps more startling is just how much of the variance is shared between different prejudices. More than half of the individual variability in devaluing attitudes toward immigrants; women; gays; and old, overweight, or disabled people can be traced to the same underlying factor (generalized prejudice; see Bergh, Akrami, & Ekehammar, 2012; Ekehammar & Akrami, 2003). Such a big chunk of variance would seem difficult to overlook in the pursuit of a comprehensive understanding of prejudice.
In this chapter we initially cover some basic empirical findings and discuss how descriptions of generalized prejudice factor(s) have developed over time. What they all have in common is the idea that devaluing and/or negative attitudes are generalized across group domains (e.g., against various ethnic, age, and religious groups). However, as we elaborate, there are also important themes that differentiate certain views. Second, we discuss some proposed contradictions to generalized prejudice research, as connected to a declining popularity of the concept since Allport's time. We note how many of these seeming contradictions can be resolved by statistical reappraisals. In the final section, we discuss a new perspective on what generalized prejudice represents. A central question here is whether generalized prejudice is associated more with a comprehensive concern for societal “order” rather than reflecting an “us versus them” mentality.
The Empirical “Fact”
Generalized prejudice is primarily reflected in the correlation between measures of devaluation of different groups. Hartley (1946) was one of the pioneers in examining this issue. His participants provided social distance ratings for 39 social groups (mainly ethnic ones), but also three fictitious groups (e.g., Pireneans). He found many substantial correlations between the various group evaluations, including the fictitious ones. Some eight years on, and many studies later, Allport (1954) proclaimed that the generalization of prejudice was “one of the facts of which we are most certain” (p. 68). As provocative as that may sound, and as much as scholars have since departed from his views, there is strong evidence for the basic idea that prejudice reproduces across targets.