Intergroup Perception and Cognition: An Integrative Framework for Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Social Categorization

The primary aim of this chapter is to provide a framework to understand and synthesize the processes of person construal—early perceptions that lead to initial ingroup/ outgroup categorizations—with the processes involved in intergroup relations. To this end, we review research examining the initial perception and categorization of ingroup and outgroup members and its downstream consequences. We first discuss bottom-up processes in person construal based on visual features (e.g., facial prototypicality and bodily cues), and then discuss how top-down factors (e.g., beliefs, stereotypes) may influence these processes. Next, we examine how the initial categorization of targets as ingroup or outgroup members influences identification, stereotyping, and groupbased evaluations, and the relations between these constructs. We also explore the implications of the activation of these constructs for a range of social judgments Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 55 # 2017 Elsevier Inc. ISSN 0065-2601 All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2016.10.001 1 including emotion identification, empathy, and intergroup behaviors. Finally, we describe a variety of well established and more recent strategies to reduce intergroup bias that target the activation of category-based knowledge, including intergroup contact, approach orientations, evaluative conditioning, and perspective taking. It is an exciting time to be an intergroup researcher. New methodologies and ways of thinking about intergroup biases are abundant. Based in part on multidisciplinary work in this area, research on social categorization processes has made robust advances (Amodio, 2014a; Freeman & Ambady, 2011; Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010; Kawakami, 2014). These advances have been particularly informative about the earliest stages of processing ingroup and outgroup members and have been fueled by work in social neuroscience, social vision, face perception, emotion, and social cognition. Our goal in this chapter is to provide a framework for understanding the initial perception and categorization of ingroup and outgroup members and the downstream consequences of these processes. Our chapter is organized in two major sections: Person Construal and Persons Construed. As depicted in Fig. 1, Section 1, Person Construal, reviews the processes involved in the initial perceptual encoding of others. Drawing on social cognitive and neuroscience evidence, we explore the interaction of bottom-up target effects (e.g., visual cues) and top-down effects (e.g., expectancies and situational factors) as they relate to early attention, affective responses, and memory for ingroup and outgroup members. Section 2, Persons Construed, focuses on how this initial categorization leads the perceiver to imbue a target with a wealth of category-based knowledge. These processes include the activation of self-outgroup associations (identification), group characteristics (stereotypes), and evaluations (prejudice). We then examine the implications of the activation of these constructs for a range of social judgments, including emotion identification, empathy for outgroups, and decision making and behaviors in an intergroup context. Finally, we explore strategies to reduce these biases. The importance of initial categorical processes and the accompanying activation of group-based knowledge to intergroup relations is undeniable (Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997; Fiske, 1998). Yet the way we measure intergroup processes and biases has changed dramatically over the past 20 years (Gawronski & Payne, 2011; Sherman et al., 2008), and these advances, in turn, have significantly influenced how we conceive of these processes. 2 K. Kawakami et al.