0000000000735675

AUTHOR

Alex Koch

Groups' warmth is a personal matter: Understanding consensus on stereotype dimensions reconciles adversarial models of social evaluation

Abstract As proponents of two theories of social evaluation, we disagree whether people spontaneously differentiate societal groups' conservative-progressive beliefs (distinct claim of the agency-beliefs-communion or ABC model) or warmth/communion (distinct claim of the stereotype content model or SCM). Our adversarial collaboration provides one way to resolve this debate. Examining people from four continents who differentiated groups in their country (N = 2356), we found lower consensus on groups' warmth/communion compared to agency/~competence and beliefs (Studies 1–4). Consensus on groups' warmth/communion was lower because people differed in self-rated agency and beliefs, and they infe…

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Supplemental Material, SPPS715070_suppl_mat - Studying the Cognitive Map of the U.S. States: Ideology and Prosperity Stereotypes Predict Interstate Prejudice

Supplemental Material, SPPS715070_suppl_mat for Studying the Cognitive Map of the U.S. States: Ideology and Prosperity Stereotypes Predict Interstate Prejudice by Alex Koch, Nicolas Kervyn, Matthieu Kervyn, and Roland Imhoff in Social Psychological and Personality Science

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(Pre)occupations: A data-driven model of jobs and its consequences for categorization and evaluation

Abstract We present a data-driven model of stereotypes about occupations (total N = 3919). Across two classification systems and national contexts (U.S.; Germany), we show remarkable convergence in the stereotype dimensions spontaneously employed to make sense of occupational groups (agency; progressiveness). Further studies show that these dimensions reflect presumed characteristics of job holders and not just describe their occupational role (Study 2), and that proximity of occupations on the emerging stereotype model increased superordinate categorization (Study 3) and contagious transfer of (positive and negative) valence from one occupation to another (Study 4). Together these studies …

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The ABC of society: Perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases intergroup cooperation

Abstract The dimensions that explain which societal groups cooperate more with which other groups remain unclear. We predicted that perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases cooperation across groups. Self-identified members (N = 583) of 30 society-representative U.S. groups (gays, Muslims, Blacks, upper class, women, Democrats, conservatives etc.) played an incentivized one-time continuous prisoner's dilemma game with one self-identified member of each of these groups. Players knew nothing of each other except one group membership. Consistent with the ABC (agency-beliefs-communion) model of spontaneous stereotypes, perceived self-gr…

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Studying the Cognitive Map of the US States: Ideology and Prosperity Stereotypes Predict Interstate Prejudice

What are the spontaneous stereotypes that U.S. citizens hold about the U.S. states? We complemented insights from theory-driven approaches to this question with insights from a novel data-driven approach. Based on pile sorting and spatial arrangement similarity ratings for the states, we computed two cognitive maps of the states. Based on ratings for the states on ∼20 candidate dimensions, we interpreted the dimensions that spanned the two maps (Studies 1 and 2). Consistent with the agency/socioeconomic success, conservative-progressive beliefs, and communion (ABC) model of spontaneous stereotypes, these dimensions that participants spontaneously used to rate the states’ similarity included…

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How Orthogonal Are the Big Two of Social Perception? On the Curvilinear Relation Between Agency and Communion.

Humans make sense of their social environment by forming impressions of others that allow predicting others’ actions. In this process of social perception, two types of information carry pivotal importance: other entities’ communion (i.e., warmth and trustworthiness) and agency (i.e., status and power). Although commonly thought of as orthogonal dimensions, we propose that these Big Two of social perception are curvilinearly related. Specifically, as we delineate from four different theoretical explanations, impressions of communion should peak at average agency, while entities too high or too low on agency should be perceived as low on communion. We show this pattern for social groups acr…

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