Critics of identity politics often wax polemically as they charge contemporary social movements with narrowly and naively engaging in essentialist politics based on perceived differences from the majority. Such essentialism, critics charge, inhibits coalition building (e.g., Phelan 1993; Kimmel 1993), cannot produce meaningful social change, and reinforces hegemonic and restrictive social categ...

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has committed $500 million to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015. To accomplish this ambitious goal, RWJF and its partners have developed a movement to tackle childhood obesity as a societal problem, calling for population-based solutions. The movement is borrowing from the “social norm change” approach that has yielded tremendous public hea...

Organizational theory emphasizes how new organizational forms are produced by technological innovation but has glossed over the role of cultural innovation. This chapter suggests that social movements are important sources of cultural innovation and identifies the scope conditions under which social movements create new organizational forms. By doing so, it lends substance to the notion of inst...

To judge another person's behavior, one often has to come to an understanding of what that behavior was in its detail. Five studies demonstrated that stereotypes influence the tacit inferences people make about the unspecified details and ambiguities of social behavior (e.g., what the behavior specifically was, what stimulus the individual reacted to, what caused the individual to act) and that...

The study aims to introduce those who are unaware about the field of peace education and provide an overview of the history, central concepts, scholarship, and practices within the field. We will survey the human and social dimensions of peace education, such as gender perspectives in peace education and human rights education. Significant time will be spent on profiling key thinkers, theories,...

Policy makers, academics, and media reports suggest that women could shrink the gender pay gap by negotiating more effectively for higher compensation. Yet women entering compensation negotiations face a dilemma: They have to weigh the benefits of negotiating against the social consequences of having negotiated. Research shows that women are penalized socially more than men for negotiating for ...

In the present chapter we first review research that has identified two fundamental dimensions of social perception. Having defined these two dimensions, we then present the results of a research program conducted to explore the relationship between them. In general, using both experimental and correlational data, we find evidence of a compensation effect between the two dimensions when two tar...

In attempting to make sense of others, perceivers regularly construct and use categorical representations (e.g. stereotypes) to streamline the person perception process. A debate that has dominated recent theorizing about the nature and function of these representations concerns the conditions under which they are activated in everyday life. The present article reviews this work and considers t...

The ability to differentiate one's body from others is a fundamental aspect of social perception and has been shown to involve the integration of sense modalities attributable to the self. Though behavioral studies in infancy have investigated infants' discrimination of body-related multisensory stimuli, whether they attribute this information as belonging to the self is still unknown. In human...