The many faces of prejudice: the “What”, the “Why”, and the “How” of inferences we make from membership in social groups

Prejudice and discrimination have undeniable consequences for people’s lives and well-being. Our knowledge of stereotyping and prejudice is predominantly based on studies of simple dichotomies of “us” vs. “them”, whereas every person we interact with in real life will simultaneously belong to multiple social groups. In this project, I introduce the differential information processing (DIP) model of intergroup attitudes to explain how we process information about others’ multiple group memberships to form impressions of them. The key proposition of the model is that the mechanisms of impression formation depend on inferences we make from social categories: categories that are seen as informative of beliefs (e.g., religion) give rise to ingroup bias, whereas categories that are seen as informative of status (e.g., education) give rise to status bias. I propose to comprehensively test this new model by addressing three essential questions: what inferences do we make from people’s membership in different social groups? why do we make them? and how do we make them? The proposed set of studies will utilize diverse methodological approaches, including cross-cultural survey experiments to capture variation in inferences people make and type and strength of biases they show across the globe; text analysis of children’s literature and experimental work with children to understand how socialization experiences shape children’s beliefs about differential informativeness of social categories; and neuroimaging work to understand if distinct neural processes can be linked to belief and status inferences and the corresponding biases. If supported, this new theoretical model will connect disparate strands of literature and bring a step-change in how we study stereotyping and prejudice, opening new avenues for more generalizable interventions for prejudice reduction.