1 Introduction

 1.1 Defining Cyber Racism

 1.2 New Terms in Research on Cyber Racism

2 Themes in the Early Research on Cyber Racism

3 Where We Are Now in the Field of Cyber Racism – Current Themes

 3.1 Cyber Racism as Intragroup Communication

  3.1.1 Online White Supremacist Communities

 3.2 Cyber Racism as Intergroup Communication

  3.2.1 How Do Opposing Camps (Racists and Anti-Racists) Engage with Each Other in Online Debates?

  3.2.2 Effects of Cyber Racism as Intergroup Communication: Ideological Polarisation

 3.3 Experiences of Cyber Racism: Research from the Perspective of the Targets

4 Newly Emerging Themes: Racist Narratives about COVID 19

5 The State: Governments and the Regulation of Cyber Racism

6 Future Directions and Conclusion

Collective action is a pervasive aspect of political life in the 21st century. In the past 20 years, it has also been increasingly studied as a psychologically mediated and consequential form of political behaviour. Initial research focused primarily on the collective organisation of action. This was appropriate: collective action is inherently a group phenomenon. However, this chapter adapts the framework provided by Duncan (2012) to take a broader perspective to examine contemporary scholarship in relation to the individual, group, and contextual factors shaping collective action and its outcomes. We review literature emphasising a key role for individual differences in ideological beliefs and moral conviction, in shaping engagement in collective action. Life experiences such as contact with members of disadvantaged groups, and mobilising interactions (online and offline) have allowed people to co-act across ostensible category boundaries. The depth and breadth of the contemporary literature suggests the need for a broader meta-theory, drawing on the principles of dynamic interactionism, to allow us to more fully articulate what kinds of situations elicit mobilisation potential, and for whom.

In this chapter we take a broad view of the social psychology of intergroup relations and apply it to the internet. We start by addressing two popular propositions about the internet. The first of these is that the internet is a safe haven for racists who, using the cover of anonymity, engage in hostile flaming of members of other communities. We can call this first proposition the anonymous cyberhate view of the internet. The second popular proposition is the idea that the internet is a hotbed of social activism where people develop plans to change the world using a device that spans continental boundaries. We call this second proposition the global activist view of the internet.

Let us be clear that there is some truth to both propositions and it is easy to find evidence for both of them. Our contention, however, is that both of the propositions are gross oversimplifications that tend to lead commentators and observers to misunderstand the dynamics present in this medium.

Barkan's chapter on Australia in his book, The guilt of nations, is a rich source of insights. There is, however, one important way that this quote fails to capture important ideas that we explore in this chapter. Specifically, we propose that collective guilt in Australia cannot be understood by assuming that a uniform ideology that can be summarized neatly as racist, sexist, xenophobic, optimistic, or patriotic is widely shared in Australian society. Rather, there are fault lines within Australian society that reflect social conflict. The social conflict is not so much between racial or ethnic groups, but is about these groups. Collective guilt in Australia has very much to do with an ongoing debate that lends itself extremely well to an intergroup social psychological analysis. In this chapter, we consider the political context and social psychology of collective guilt in Australia and discuss some empirical research on this issue. In conclusion, we suggest a theoretical resolution to the paradoxical relationship between social identification and collective guilt.

The Australian context

Before considering the social psychology of the current situation, it is useful to outline the historical and political context of Australia (matters that are discussed in detail by Augoustinos & LeCouteur, this volume, Chapter 13).

The purpose of this book

Imagine for a moment a busy city intersection with a police officer controlling traffic. All of the users of that street are individuals, but they are also members of society and, like the police officer they are members of groups that help us to explain why those people act in the way they do at particular times. Indeed, individuals and groups can be said to be the central facts of society. Without individuals there could be no society, but unless individuals also perceive themselves to belong to groups, that is, to share characteristics, circumstances, values and beliefs with other people, then society would be without structure or order. These perceptions of groups are called stereotypes.

If we accept that perceptions of groups are so important for people to understand the social world, then understanding those stereotypes is also extremely important for social psychology. Social psychologists such as Asch (1952) have argued that understanding the relationship between individuals and groups is the master problem for social psychology. In addressing this problem we need to recognize though, that individuals and groups tend to have their effects on each other through their psychological representation within individual minds. That is, social objects affect us through the way they are perceived rather than through the application of physical force.

Think again of the police officer controlling traffic at a busy intersection. The police officer does not (normally) need to physically restrain the traffic from passing through the intersection.

The chapters in this book make a number of distinct contributions that help us understand the importance of explanation in stereotype formation. Despite the distinctiveness of the various contributions, a number of key themes emerge and recur. Before addressing these in more detail it is useful to remind ourselves of perhaps one key theme that has guided this volume and gives all of its contributions some common ground. Perhaps more implied than explicitly stated, all of the contributions focus on stereotype formation (and more generally ‘stereotyping’) as a dynamic psychological process embedded in intergroup relations. This point may sound like a truism, but in our view, the partial nature of some previous approaches flows from an emphasis on one or other of these two components. That is, much previous and contemporary research has tended to focus on stereotyping as a psychological process, but to neglect the social and contextual dimensions of this process (e.g., the importance of own group membership, content, the nature of the intergroup relations). Alternatively, where research has recognized the social dimension of stereotyping, it has often neglected the dynamic explanatory psychological processes involved (stereotypes as fixed structures, percepts, pictures in our heads, epiphenomena of intergroup relations or culture). If there is a common theme that brings many of the current contributions together, then, it is the attempt to integrate the cognitive and the social aspects of the stereotyping process by attention to both cognitive and social levels of explanation and analysis.

In this chapter I explore the contribution of research on category formation to the study of stereotype formation. The rationale for this is fairly straightforward. Stereotypes are based on or rely on categories, and in particular they rely on categories of people. If we accept the additional point that stereotypes are explanations then we are left with an important question: how does categorization contribute to the explanatory power of stereotypes?

As we will see in this chapter the explanatory nature of categories has been acknowledged for a long time. This is seen most clearly when we consider that the use of the term concept in cognitive psychology has been almost indistinguishable from the use of the term category. The term ‘concept’ is synonymous with the assignment of meaning or the development of understanding. If stereotypes are inextricably bound to categories then it should also be the case that stereotypes involve gaining or developing understanding as was argued in Chapter 1. It follows that the cognitive psychological work on category and concept formation should repay a close look.

The path I will follow is first to discuss how that approach that I term the constraint relations formulation helps us to understand treatments of categorization in cognitive and social psychology. I use this formulation to arrive at a summary of some key implications of the categorization process for understanding stereotype formation.

Women are more romantic than men. Scientists are duller than artists. We often make such judgements about groups. Some of these judgements are based on folklore, others are based on observation or experience. When we do rely on observed data how good are we at detecting relationships between group membership and behaviour? Do we find it easy to detect differences between groups? Are our judgements biased? This chapter deals with these issues and focuses on the paradigm that has dominated research on the formation of stereotypic differences between groups over the last three decades: the illusory correlation paradigm. In this paradigm respondents are exposed to a series of behavioural instances each linked to an individual belonging to a specific group. The term illusory correlation refers to perceived associations between attributes and instances other than those contained in the data. In the present case it generally refers to the perception of a stereotypic association of certain features with a given group, typically when the available data is presumed to give little evidence for this (hence ‘illusory’).

Detecting relationships between events in the environment, between group membership and behaviour, is an essential ingredient of adaptive behaviour. The information derived from these relationships or covariations allow us to make sense of the world by explaining the past, controlling the present and predicting the future (Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984; Crocker, 1981). In these terms, detecting contingency is clearly important for our well-being and even our survival.

This book developed from a series of interactions between social psychologists at the Australian National University, the Catholic University at Louvain-la-Neuve and the University of Amsterdam. In fact, all of the contributors to the current volume were doing research at one or other of those institutions during the 1990s.

All of the contributors to the volume were motivated by a desire to get beyond some of the ideas about stereotyping that had so dominated work in the 1970s and 1980s and were showing remarkable powers of recovery in the 1990s. In doing this work several of us saw that despite differences in theoretical perspectives and/or our geographical location there were common threads in our work.

Many of the common ideas related to a view of stereotype formation as a search for meaning on the part of the perceiver. We used different terms for this search for meaning, such as explanation, understanding, deriving differentiated meaning, but the commonalities in what we were doing were obvious to us. The key ideas were consistent with the classic work of Bruner and had figured prominently in social psychology in work inspired by self-categorization theory and by social judgeability theory, which made the point about the link between stereotyping and meaning in a more general way.

It was perhaps in the domain of stereotype formation that the idea of sense-making had the most to offer.