Why we stereotype influences how we stereotype. Self-enhancement and comprehension effects on social perception

Stereotypes are generalized beliefs about the characteristics of groups of individuals and form the basis of prejudice. Stereotyping can be functional in at least two ways: as a tool to understand the world around us and because it can help to elevate ones self-esteem. In this dissertation, the focus lies on the specific influences of these two goals on the use of stereotypes in social perception. Through a number of experiments, it is shown that an increased need to understand the world around us (for example, when one walks around in an unfamiliar city), results in more positive and negative stereotyping, whereas an increased need to elevate ones self-esteem (for example, when one failed an exam), results only in more negative stereotyping. Subsequently, when these needs are relieved through stereotyping or in a different way, stereotype use decreases. Furthermore, it appears that these two goals are not interchangeable with respect to stereotyping: when stereotyping is driven by a comprehension goal, only increased understanding, and not an increased self-esteem, counteracts stereotyping. This finding highlights the importance of distinguishing between comprehension driven and self-enhancement driven stereotyping, because they represent two different routes that lead to different kinds of stereotyping and can be countered in different ways. In other words: why we stereotype influences how we use, and can counteract the use of, stereotypes. Deze dissertatie is onderzocht naar aanleiding van de fraude gepleegd door sociaal-psycholoog Diederik Stapel. De Commissie Noort (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) heeft daarbij vastgesteld dat in de hoofdstukken 2, 3 en 4 gebruik is gemaakt van frauduleuze data verstrekt door Stapel. De Commissie heeft geen aanwijzingen gevonden dat de auteur van de dissertatie doelbewust heeft meegewerkt aan datavervalsing. Zie voor meer informatie: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/.Stereotypes are generalized beliefs about the characteristics of groups of individuals and form the basis of prejudice. Stereotyping can be functional in at least two ways: as a tool to understand the world around us and because it can help to elevate ones self-esteem. In this dissertation, the focus lies on the specific influences of these two goals on the use of stereotypes in social perception. Through a number of experiments, it is shown that an increased need to understand the world around us (for example, when one walks around in an unfamiliar city), results in more positive and negative stereotyping, whereas an increased need to elevate ones self-esteem (for example, when one failed an exam), results only in more negative stereotyping. Subsequently, when these needs are relieved through stereotyping or in a different way, stereotype use decreases. Furthermore, it appears that these two goals are not interchangeable with respect to stereotyping: when stereotyping is driven by a comprehension goal, only increased understanding, and not an increased self-esteem, counteracts stereotyping. This finding highlights the importance of distinguishing between comprehension driven and self-enhancement driven stereotyping, because they represent two different routes that lead to different kinds of stereotyping and can be countered in different ways. In other words: why we stereotype influences how we use, and can counteract the use of, stereotypes. This dissertation has been examined in connection with the fraud committed by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The Noort Committee (University of Groningen) found that in the chapters 2, 3 and 4 use has been made of fraudulent data provided by Stapel. The Committee has found no evidence that the author of the dissertation has deliberately contributed to data falsification. Please find more information on: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe