About prisoners and dictators: the role of other-self focus, social value orientation, and sterotype primes in shaping cooperative behavior.

Six experiments examined the effects of person factors (i.e., social value orientation and consistency) and situation factors (i.e., stereotype primes) on cooperative behavior in various experimental games. Results indicated that the main and joint influences of person and situation factors on cooperative choices depend on the nature of the game (i.e., prisoner's dilemma or dictator game). Social value orientation, consistency, and primes affect cooperative behavior only in a dictator game, while these factors also lead to rumination about partner's behavioral intentions and personality (and therefore to different cooperative choices) in a prisoner's dilemma game. Differences between these games were explained in terms of the impact they have on other- and self-focus.Choice; Consistency; Dictator game; Effects; Factors; Prisoner's dilemma game; Social Value Orientation; Stereotype Priming; Value;

Essentialism in social representations of citizenship: an analysis of Greeks’ and migrants’ discourse

Following a Social Representations approach, the article examines the representations of citizenship held by both migrants and Greek citizens in Greece after the announcement of a heavily debated citizenship legislation. Essentialism, a way of representing social categories as holding an underlying essence that determines their characteristics, was used as an analytical tool to understand the inclusive or exclusive function of representations of citizenship towards migrants. Findings showed that Greeks construct representations based on ethnic, civic, and cultural ideas, while migrants construct representation of citizenship based on civic and cultural ideas. Essentialism was a way of constructing ethnic and cultural representations of citizenship and functioned in both exclusive and inclusive ways, but assimilatory terms accordingly. Civic and cultural representations of citizenship were constructed in nonessentialist ways and functioned in inclusive ways. However, from Greeks' perspective, civic inclusion was conditioned upon an often-questioned legality of migrants and upon cultural assimilation terms. Studying both the content and the essentialist/nonessentialist formulation of representations of citizenship is an important tool in understanding the politics of inclusion and exclusion of citizens in the social arena

Cognitive consequences of perceiving social exclusion

Although a great deal is now known about how people mentally represent individuals and groups, less attention has been paid to the question of how interpersonal relationships are represented in memory. Drawing on principles of categorization, this paper reports an investigation into how we mentally represent the relationships of others. In three experiments, evidence for assimilation effects following social exclusion (and subsequent categorization) is found. Experiment 1 uses a judgment paradigm to demonstrate that social exclusion influences the perception of interpersonal closeness. Experiments 2 and 3 employ a memory confusion paradigm to establish that representations of relationship partners are assimilated following the exclusion of a third party. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Not Competent but Warm... Really? Compensatory Stereotypes in the French-speaking World

Two studies examined the compensation hypothesis that members of both high- and low-status groups associate high-status groups with high levels of competence and low levels of warmth on the one hand, and low-status groups with low levels of competence and high levels of warmth, on the other. Building upon existing linguistic relations between the French and the Belgians, Study 1 had standard, i.e. French, and non-standard, i.e. Belgian, speakers rate the linguistic skills, competence, and warmth of both groups and report their meta-stereotypes. As predicted, both groups of participants saw the French as more skilled linguistically than Belgians and evaluated standard speakers as more competent than warm and non-standard speakers as more warm than competent. This pattern also emerged in respondents’ meta-stereotypes. Study 2 revealed that compensation was less marked among a third group of Francophone speakers, i.e. Swiss, even if the latter respondents seemed well aware of the pattern guiding Belgian and French representations of each other. We discuss the implications of the findings in terms of motivated intergroup stereotypes

Exploring psychological mechanisms of collective action: Does relevance of group identity influence how people cope with collective disadvantage?

Two studies examined how the relevance of group identity influences two psychological mechanisms of collective action: Emotion- and problem-focused coping with collective disadvantage. Extending Van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, and Leach's (2004) integrative theoretical model of coping with collective disadvantage, we predicted that when group identity is more relevant to disadvantaged group members, it increases their collective action tendencies through their feelings of group-based anger about their group's disadvantage. When group identity is less relevant and hence emotion-focused coping processes are less likely, group-efficacy beliefs become more predictive of disadvantaged group members' collective action tendencies because people focus more instrumentally on whether collective action will be effective (and benefit them) or not. A field study and a follow-up experiment both showed that the relevance of group identity facilitated emotion-focused coping and moderated problem-focused coping with collective disadvantage. We discuss these results in terms of two distinct psychological mechanisms of collective action

Is Martin Luther King or Malcom X the More Acceptable Face of Protest? High-Status Groups' Reactions to Low- Status Groups' Collective Action:High status groups’ reactions to low status groups’ collective action

Work on collective action focuses mainly on the perspective of disadvantaged groups. However, the dynamics of social change cannot be fully understood without taking into account the reactions of the members of advantaged groups to collective action by low-status groups. In 10 experiments conducted in 4 different intergroup contexts (N = 1349), we examine advantaged groups support for normative versus non-normative collective action by disadvantaged groups. Experiments 1a to 1e show that normative collective action is perceived as more likely to improve the disadvantaged group's position and that non-normative collective action is perceived as more damaging to the advantaged group's social image. Also, these differences are due to differences in perceptions of actions violating norms of protest and perceptions of protesters as blaming the advantaged group for the inequality. Experiments 2a to 3 show that high compared with low identified members of advantaged groups distinguish more between types of collective action, showing a greater preference for the normative type. Both a mediational design and an experimental-causal-chain design (Experiments 3 and 4) show that support among high identifiers depends more on whether collective action damages the high-status group's social image than on whether it actually reduces inequality. Findings suggest that high-status groups' support for collective action is not only shaped by the perceived likelihood of change but also by its potential damage to the image of the high-status ingroup

Beyond awareness and resources: evaluative conditioning may be sensitive to processing goals

"Evaluative conditioning (EC) is often regarded as an automatic affective learning process. Yet, recent empirical evidence suggests that EC may actually be sensitive to contingency awareness and to the availability of attentional resources. Here, we examine for the first time a third horseman of EC automaticity: processing goals. Specifically, we had participants engage an EC task after completing a task known to elicit the goal of processing either the perceptual similarities or the perceptual differences between stimuli. EC was predicted and found to be larger in the former (similarity-focus) than in the latter (difference-focus) condition. This finding provides original evidence that EC is sensitive to the processing goal activated in participants as they encode the CS–US pairings. The theoretical implications of this finding are discussed." [author's abstract

When do primes prime? The moderating role of the self-concept in individuals’ susceptibility to priming effects on social behavior

"Using cooperative behavior in economic decision-making settings, we predicted and found that people’s susceptibility to priming influences is moderated by two factors: people’s chronic accessibility to a behavioral repertoire and people’s self-concept activation. In Experiment 1, we show that individuals highly consistent in their social value orientation (SVO) assimilate their behavior to their dispositions rather than to the primes, whereas the opposite effect is obtained among individuals with a low consistent SVO. In Experiment 2, we show that low consistent SVO individuals become less susceptible to priming influences when their self-concept is activated. These studies shed new light on individuals’ susceptibility to priming influences on social behavior." [author's abstract