Culture is a central concept in the social sciences. It is also difficult to examine rigorously. I study the oldest university in East Africa and a cradle of political elites, Makerere University, where halls of residence developed distinct cultures in the 1970s such that some hall cultures are activist (e.g. Lumumba Hall) while others are respectful to authorities (e.g. Livingstone Hall) even though assignment to halls has been random since 1970. I leverage this unique setting to understand how culture forms and affects the values and behaviours of young adults. Participant observation, interviews and archives suggest that cultural differences arose from critical junctures that biased group (hall) composition and from intergroup (inter-hall) competition. Hall governments promote cultural and institutional persistence through the intergenerational transmission of norms and practices, thereby highlighting the role of political hierarchy in reproducing culture.

Do individuals previously targeted by genocide become more supportive of other victimized groups? How are these political lessons internalized and passed down across generations? To answer these questions, the authors leverage original survey data collected among Holocaust survivors in the United States and their descendants, Jews with no immediate family connection to the Holocaust, and non-Jewish Americans. They find that historical victimization is associated with increased support for vulnerable out-groups, generating stable political attitudes that endure across generations. Holocaust survivors are most supportive of aiding refugees, followed by descendants, especially those who grew up discussing the Holocaust with their survivor relatives. An embedded experiment demonstrates the steadfastness of these attitudes: unlike non-Jews or Jews without survivor relatives, survivors’ and descendants’ views toward refugees do not change after reading an in-group versus out-group–protective interpretation of the “never again” imperative. Histories of victimization can play an ameliorative role in intergroup relations.

The war in Donbas led some observers to speculate that this event might threaten intergroup relations in Ukraine. While studies in the 1990s indicated relatively positive attitudes between the different ethnic and linguistic groups, it has not been analyzed systematically how these attitudes have developed over time. Such an analysis contributes to our general understanding as to how war and nation-building politics affect attitudes toward minorities. Analyzing survey data from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology from 1995 to 2018 using multivariate statistical methods, I show that the prejudice toward Russian-speaking Ukrainians – measured using the social distance scale – has increased since 2014, when both the war and Poroshenko’s presidency began, although the rise is rather small. A likely explanation to this phenomenon is the perceived link between Russian speakers and Russia as the aggressor in the war. The fact that Yushchenko’s presidency (2006–2009) did not result in a similar increase of negative sentiments, despite similarities between Yushchenko’s and Poroshenko’s identity politics, allows me to suggest that the higher level of prejudice under Poroshenko cannot be solely explained by the political rhetoric promoting an ethnic Ukrainian identity. However, the interplay of political rhetoric and war might have been relevant.

We don't yet have adequate theories of what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group. Worse still, many people think we do. This mistaken belief is a consequence of the state of play: Until now, researchers have relied on their own intuitions to link up the concept social group on the one hand and the results of particular studies or models on the other. While necessary, this reliance on intuition has been purchased at a considerable cost. When looked at soberly, existing theories of social groups are either (i) literal, but not remotely adequate (such as models built atop economic games), or (ii) simply metaphorical (typically a subsumption or containment metaphor). Intuition is filling in the gaps of an explicit theory. This paper presents a computational theory of what, literally, a group representation is in the context of conflict: It is the assignment of agents to specific roles within a small number of triadic interaction types. This “mental definition” of a group paves the way for a computational theory of social groups – in that it provides a theory of what exactly the information-processing problem of representing and reasoning about a group is. For psychologists, this paper offers a different way to conceptualize and study groups, and suggests that a non-tautological definition of a social group is possible. For cognitive scientists, this paper provides a computational benchmark against which natural and artificial intelligences can be held.

Despite its predictive power, there is substantial debate about the attitudes measured by the racial resentment scale (RRS) and the relative weight of each. One group contends that the RRS is a valid measure of racial animus, foregrounding a basic psychological acrimony; some foreground social concerns about group status hierarchies; and yet others assert that the RRS is an invalid measure of racial enmity, instead primarily tapping non-racial principles and politics. We use a multimethod approach to address these debates, mapping the frames of reference respondents use in explaining their RRS answers. We find that the RRS fundamentally measures racial concerns and minimally taps non-racial politics. Although RRS responses reflect psychological acrimony, this orientation is substantially outweighed by social concerns about relative group position. Moreover, RRS responses substantially reflect beliefs about the relevance of race in the contemporary US and the sources of racial inequality, and values about individualism and fairness. We discuss how one of the most potent measures of present-day racial prejudice is rightly understood, and the implications for theory and research at the intersection of race and politics.

Conflict can profoundly affect individuals and their groups. Oftentimes, conflict involves a clash between one side seeking change and increased gains through victory and the other side defending the status quo and protecting against loss and defeat. However, theory and empirical research largely neglected these conflicts between attackers and defenders, and the strategic, social, and psychological consequences of attack and defense remain poorly understood. To fill this void, we model (1) the clashing of attack and defense as games of strategy and reveal that (2) attack benefits from mismatching its target's level of defense, whereas defense benefits from matching the attacker's competitiveness. This suggests that (3) attack recruits neuroendocrine pathways underlying behavioral activation and overconfidence, whereas defense invokes neural networks for behavioral inhibition, vigilant scanning, and hostile attributions; and that (4) people invest less in attack than defense, and attack often fails. Finally, we propose that (5) in intergroup conflict, out-group attack needs institutional arrangements that motivate and coordinate collective action, whereas in-group defense benefits from endogenously emerging in-group identification. We discuss how games of attack and defense may have shaped human capacities for prosociality and aggression, and how third parties can regulate such conflicts and reduce their waste.

The foreign-born population in the United States has reached new heights, and experts predict that the country will be “majority minority” by 2042, possibly earlier. Despite its growing ethnic, racial, national, and other forms of diversity, the fundamental location of Blackness at the bottom of the pyramid of structural racism endures. In attempts to overcome the real and perceived tensions that characterize relationships between immigrants and African Americans, efforts to create space for interpersonal connection and shared structural analysis have proliferated in organizations across the country. Drawing from seventy-five interviews with individuals leading these initiatives and the review of over fifty different pedagogical resources they have developed and used, this article presents a classification and assessment of these programs. We consider these programs using an anti-racist, African Americanist framework reflected in Steinberg’s “standpoint of [the] black figure, crouched on the ground as others pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity” (2005, p. 43), and analyze their successes and shortcomings. Successes include the creation of spaces for interaction across difference and the building of a shared analysis. We find evidence of transformative effects at the intra- and interpersonal levels. The greatest limitations include immigrant-centricity in relationship-building efforts and a reluctance to engage immigrants in conversation about their relationships to Whiteness, Blackness, and racial hierarchies in the United States and in their countries of origin.

The present study aims to understand the conditions where prejudice can be predicted by ingroup and outgroup meta-prejudice. The data collecting was disseminated toward Muslim and Christian participants (N = 362) living in Maumere, Flores Island, Indonesia. In Flores, Christianity is the largest religion and Islam is the second. Across two samples, the effects of ingroup and outgroup meta-prejudice on prejudice were found to be moderated by ingroup self-evaluation. It shows that at high level (but not low) of positive ingroup self-evaluation, ingroup and outgroup meta-prejudice were found to predict prejudice. The results suggest that it is important to consider how group members evaluate their own group and how group members think what others are thinking, in the study pertaining to intergroup relations.

Social psychologists have shown a profound interest in intergroup relationships, but there are very few papers focusing on the developmental aspects that explain the psychological mechanisms involved in the construction of group and cultural identity. Our research aims to explore how the self-categorization of Andalusian children evolves. We tried to assess the degree to which they self-identify as Andalusian, Spanish, and European, and how this identification changes with age. We were also interested in the affective evaluation of different groups (French, Italian, English, German, Spanish, Catalonian, and Andalusian) made by Andalusian children. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationship between self-categorization and the evaluation of these groups. Results show that the development of national (autonomous community) identity in these children is influenced by their cognitive development, as well as by the relationships among the regional communities of Spain and the relationships between Spain and other countries. The peculiarity of Andalusians as a group is that they assume both identities: Spanish and Andalusian, from a very early age. In-group favoritism is an extended phenomenon at all ages, and Andalusian children have a negative stereotype of the other Spanish groups and other European communities.

Almost six decades of research have consistently demonstrated that intergroup contact is one of the most powerful ways of improving intergroup attitudes. At least two important limitations, however, still compel researchers to continue work in this area: the issue of long-term effects of contact, and the processes underlying such effects. This report makes a theoretical and empirical contribution with regard to these two aspects introducing a new mediator of the effects of contact: verification of qualities of typical ingroup members that may or may not characterize individual group members (e.g. verification of ingroup identities). One hundred and forty-two high school students participated in a two-wave longitudinal study with 12 weeks’ lag in Spain. Cross-sectional and longitudinal mediational analyses using multiple imputation data showed that intergroup contact improves general outgroup evaluation through increasing verification of ingroup identities. This research demonstrates the relevance of considering verification of ingroup identity as a mediator for the positive effects of intergroup contact.

In this paper, we examine how community-based organizations (CBOs) and their leaders negotiate and expand the boundaries of the communities they serve and represent. Drawing upon interviews with organizational leaders and documentary data from Asian American CBOs in the San Francisco Bay Area, we find that nearly all of the organizations in our sample engaged in cross-racial work, incorporating other racial groups into their programs, campaigns, and partnerships. However, leaders varied in how they understood this work as tied to maintaining or expanding their community of focus. The majority of the leaders in our sample discussed cross-racial work as a way to accommodate other racial groups while maintaining a focus on Asian Americans or Asian-ethnics. Other leaders included other racial groups, mainly Latinos and African Americans, in expanded missions and goals, broadening not only resources and collective action efforts, but also community boundaries through racial inclusion. We argue that pressures and incentives related to funding, shared interests, and organizational survival may encourage CBOs to engage in cross-racial work, but these factors do not necessarily sustain racial inclusion over time. Instead, how leaders identify and construct a sense of expanded group boundaries for the community that they serve and represent helps an organization to commit to racial inclusion.

Does elite rhetoric influence how Latinos view their relationship with African Americans? In this paper, we provide a systematic empirical assessment of the impact that elite messages have on Latino perceptions of economic and political commonality by drawing on two unique data sources: the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS) and a survey experiment embedded in the September 2010 Latino Decisions Tracking Poll (LDS). Our analysis reveals that the attitudinal effects of exposure to elite messages are strongly conditioned by one's political partisanship. To be more precise, we find that although exposure to elite messages leads Democrats to express more in common politically with African Americans, it fails to exert any significant influence among other groups and on different dependent variables. Specifically, the evidence presented here shows that reception of persuasive messages from like-minded political leaders contributes nothing to our understanding of how attitudes on economic commonality are formed and very little to our understanding of the source from which perceptions of political commonality arise among Republicans and Independents. In addition to making significant contributions to the literatures on commonality, multiracial coalitions and public opinion, these findings also make a strong case for further evaluating the role of political leadership in forging bonds of cooperation across racial lines.

For most of the history of prejudice research, negativity has been treated as its emotional and cognitive signature, a conception that continues to dominate work on the topic. By this definition, prejudice occurs when we dislike or derogate members of other groups. Recent research, however, has highlighted the need for a more nuanced and “inclusive” (Eagly 2004) perspective on the role of intergroup emotions and beliefs in sustaining discrimination. On the one hand, several independent lines of research have shown that unequal intergroup relations are often marked by attitudinal complexity, with positive responses such as affection and admiration mingling with negative responses such as contempt and resentment. Simple antipathy is the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that nurturing bonds of affection between the advantaged and the disadvantaged sometimes entrenches rather than disrupts wider patterns of discrimination. Notably, prejudice reduction interventions may have ironic effects on the political attitudes of the historically disadvantaged, decreasing their perceptions of injustice and willingness to engage in collective action to transform social inequalities.

These developments raise a number of important questions. Has the time come to challenge the assumption that negative evaluations are inevitably the cognitive and affective hallmarks of discrimination? Is the orthodox concept of prejudice in danger of side-tracking, if not obstructing, progress towards social justice in a fuller sense? What are the prospects for reconciling a prejudice reduction model of change, designed to get people to like one another more, with a collective action model of change, designed to ignite struggles to achieve intergroup equality?

Dramatic demographic changes are occurring in the United States, and some of the most dramatic changes are occurring in the South from Latino immigration. Latinos, by and large, are an entirely new population in the region. How are Black southerners reacting to this new population? Using survey data gathered from a southern location, this article explores several questions related to whether Blacks see these new residents as friendly neighbors or economic competitors. Results suggest that Blacks and non-Blacks perceive a potential economic threat from continued Latino immigration, but Blacks are more concerned about the effects of Latino immigration than are Whites.

We employ qualitative in-depth and focus group data to examine how racial stereotypes affect relations between Black and White undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. Specifically, we employ the concept of metastereotypes—Blacks' knowledge and perceptions of the racial attitudes that Whites have of Blacks. Our interest is in the accuracy of Black students' beliefs about Whites' racial attitudes to their group, and the consequences of metastereotypical thinking for Black students' academic performance. We find that the Black students in our sample possess some clear and largely negative metastereotypes concerning how Whites generally think about Blacks, and these metastereotypes are quite accurate. Moreover, these negative group images are at the heart of a key campus “problem”—Whites' hostility to affirmative action and the assumption that Blacks are not qualified to be at the university; and, ironically, most Blacks seem to have internalized a piece of these negative stereotypes. These results are a tangible manifestation of double-consciousness—Blacks' perceptions of themselves both through their own eyes and through the eyes of Whites, and evidence of Steele's theory of stereotype threat, in as much as Black students expend considerable energy attempting to debunk the myth of Black intellectual inferiority.