Politically motivated aesthetic judgments

Are people motivated to feel that clothes worn by members of their political ingroup (outgroup) are more (less) beautiful and valuable? Building on research on politically motivated judgments, affective polarization, and social distancing, this study investigated how aesthetic judgments about the design and color of clothes, and willingness to pay for identical clothes, changed among Swedes (N=638) after they learnt that the clothes were worn by politicians from their most- or least-liked party. The results supported both a negative outgroup effect (i.e., clothes associated with the least-liked party became less attractive) and a positive ingroup effect (i.e., clothes associated with the most-liked party became more attractive and valuable). Clothes worn by non-politicians were evaluated similarly after the identity of the person wearing them was revealed. Particularly the positive ingroup effect was stronger among rightists than leftists, consistent with theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in motivated reasoning and relational motivations.

The Ingroup–Outgroup Relationship Influences Their Humanity: A Moderation Analysis of Status and Gender

The aim of this study is to examine whether gender and status moderate the teacher–student relationship (TSR) and the perception of dehumanization in teachers and students. A total of 528 participants from a university in Laguna (74% students and 26% professors) completed a questionnaire based on the TSR scale, organizational dehumanization, and demographic variables. PROCESS, a mediation and moderation package, was used to analyze data. The results indicated that ingroup–outgroup relationship significantly influences the perception of organizational dehumanization (p < 0.001). In addition, gender (p < 0.001) and status (p < 0.001) have moderating roles. Specifically, female students are at most risk of perceiving themselves dehumanized, and males with high status (teachers) are less vulnerable to dehumanization. These findings are highly significant for the advancement of knowledge of the intergroup relationship and organizational dehumanization and have practical implications for teachers and students.

Challenges to Learners in Interpreting Self as Other, Post COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted continuing constraints on the ability of students to interact with teachers and peers. Regarding this imposed segregation, what has not been considered is the effect of learners seeing self as other. With respect to augmentations of their body in interpersonal space by, (1) extending the body through witnessing themselves regularly in videoconferencing learning sessions, (2) isolating the body as a result of spending time apart from peers, social distancing at home, and (3) protecting the body through required mask-wearing where learners now consider who they represent in a mask, there are three important ways in which learners have felt unable to recognize themselves as they did pre-COVID-19. This migration from self to other, involving ingroup/outgroup distinctions, will be investigated from a number of perspectives—both sociological and psychological. Why the turning of self into other is problematic to the psyche will be discussed, as will the possible consequences for this ongoing lack of learner recognition long term, including focus on the new norms or embracing self-directed learning. Based on this analysis, the type of mentorship by teachers and parents that may be appropriate for helping learners contend with these changes will be recommended.

Affective Polarization and the Populist Radical Right: Creating the Hating?

Do populist radical right (PRR) parties fuel affective polarization? If so, how and under which circumstances? Based on a comparative cross-country analysis covering 103 elections in 28 European countries and an examination of longitudinal data from the Netherlands, we show that PRR parties occupy a particular position in the affective political landscape because they both radiate and receive high levels of dislike. In other words, supporters of PRR parties are uniquely (and homogeneously) negative about (supporters of) mainstream parties and vice versa. Our analyses suggest that these high levels of antipathy are most likely due to the combination of these parties' nativism and populism – two different forms of ingroup–outgroup thinking. Our findings also suggest that greater electoral success by PRR parties reduces dislike towards them, while government participation appears threatening to all voters except coalition partners.

National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world

Cooperation within and across borders is of paramount importance for the provision of public goods. Parochialism – the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members – limits contributions to global public goods. National parochialism (i.e., greater cooperation among members of the same nation) could vary across nations and has been hypothesized to be associated with rule of law, exposure to world religions, relational mobility and pathogen stress. We conduct an experiment in participants from 42 nations (N = 18,411), and observe cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma with ingroup, outgroup, and unidentified partners. We observe that national parochialism is a ubiquitous phenomenon: it is present to a similar degree across the nations studied here, is independent of cultural distance, and occurs both when decisions are private or public. These findings inform existing theories of parochialism and suggest it may be an obstacle to the provision of global public goods.

‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech

Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.

(Eye-) Tracking the Other-Race Effect: Comparison of Eye Movements During Encoding and Recognition of Ingroup Faces With Proximal and Distant Outgroup Faces

People experience difficulties recognizing faces of ethnic outgroups, known as the other-race effect. The present eye-tracking study investigates if this effect is related to differences in visual attention to ingroup and outgroup faces. We measured gaze fixations to specific facial features and overall eye-movement activity level during an old/new recognition task comparing ingroup faces with proximal and distal ethnic outgroup faces. Recognition was best for ingroup faces and decreased gradually for proximal and distal outgroup faces. Participants attended more to the eyes of ingroup faces than outgroup faces, but this effect was unrelated to recognition performance. Ingroup-outgroup differences in eye-movement activity level did not emerge during the study phase, but during the recognition phase, with ingroup-outgroup differences varying as a function of recognition accuracy and old/new effects. Overall, ingroup-outgroup effects on recognition performance and eye movements were more pronounced for recognition of new items, emphasizing the role of retrieval processes.

Greater Diversity or Fewer Whites? Disentangling Heterogeneity and Non-White Share at Macro and Micro Levels

Scholarship on the consequences of racial/ethnic diversity often claims that diversity undermines trust, participation and cooperation. This work has been criticized for its inability to discern the causal effects of diversity. We draw attention to a more elementary issue: most studies are unable to interpret associations between their outcomes of interest and diversity, as these may be due to associations with non-White or immigrant shares. We make the practical and theoretical case for preserving the distinction between diversity—i.e., mixture—and non-White or immigrant shares—e.g., percentage Black or percentage foreign-born—, and we warn scholars about the dangers of using language and measures associated with diversity, especially in contexts, like North America and Europe, where diversity strongly overlaps with non-White or immigrant shares. On a practical front, the policy recommendations that follow from the claim “greater diversity is associated with less prosociality” are different from those that follow from the claim “greater non-White share is associated with less prosociality among Whites.” On a theoretical front, most studies of diversity rely on theories that are predicated on ingroup/outgroup shares—most commonly intergroup conflict/threat theory—rather than on diversity; the predictions implied by popular theories, however, contradict those implied by claims about diversity. Importantly, two empirical obstacles undermine our capacity to disentangle associations with diversity from associations with non-White or immigrant shares. The first stems from the underrepresentation of predominately non-White (or predominately immigrant) communities in the real world. The second concerns our ability to infer that individual attitudes and behavior are correlated with diversity from correlations between macro-level outcomes and diversity. Finally, we spell out the kinds of data required to draw empirically sound conclusions about associations between diversity and social outcomes. With an appendix by Daniel Lacker.

Further evidence for the role of felt understanding in intergroup relations: The relation of Japanese-Chinese residents in Japan

Felt understanding in intergroup context is the belief that members of an outgroup understand and accept ingroup members’ perspectives. A series of studies in Europe conducted by Livingstone, Fernández Rodríguez, and Rothers (2019) showed the unique effect of felt understanding in intergroup relations. The effects were apparent even when controlling for outgroup beliefs and metabeliefs. The present article reports a cross-cultural replication of the findings in the relations of Japanese and Chinese residents in Japan. As expected, felt understanding uniquely predicted intergroup relational outcomes (e.g., outgroup belief, action tendencies, and evaluation of ingroup-outgroup relations) in the relations. The authors’ findings have important implications for helping us improve the relations of Japanese and Chinese residents in Japan.

Populist and nativist attitudes: Does ingroup-outgroup thinking spill over across domains?

What are the attitudinal consequences of the growing pervasiveness of populism and nativism? We conceive of both populism and nativism as binary moral frameworks predicated on an antagonistic relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Our study investigates the presence of spillover effects between these two forms of ingroup-outgroup thinking among survey respondents in the Netherlands. We posit that exposure to populist (nativist) messages fuels nativism (populism), but only among those positively predisposed toward these messages in the first place. A first survey experiment, focusing on antipathies toward refugees and Muslim immigrants, confirms the former expectation, but a second experiment calls into question the latter hypothesis. Moreover, the second experiment does not replicate the effects of populist message exposure on general immigration attitudes. We discuss several possible reasons for these mixed results.