Predicting human behavior toward members of different social groups

Abstract

Disparities in outcomes across social groups pervade human societies and are of central interest to the social sciences. How people treat others is known to depend on a multitude of factors (e.g., others' gender, ethnicity, appearance) even when these should be irrelevant. However, despite substantial progress, much remains unknown regarding () the set of mechanisms shaping people's behavior toward members of different social groups and () the extent to which these mechanisms can explain the structure of existing societal disparities. Here, we show in a set of experiments the important interplay between social perception and social valuation processes in explaining how people treat members of different social groups. Building on the idea that stereotypes can be organized onto basic, underlying dimensions, we first found using laboratory economic games that quantitative variation in stereotypes about different groups' warmth and competence translated meaningfully into resource allocation behavior toward those groups. Computational modeling further revealed that these effects operated via the interaction of social perception and social valuation processes, with warmth and competence exerting diverging effects on participants' preferences for equitable distributions of resources. This framework successfully predicted behavior toward members of a diverse set of social groups across samples and successfully generalized to predict societal disparities documented in labor and education settings with substantial precision and accuracy. Together, these results highlight a common set of mechanisms linking social group information to social treatment and show how preexisting, societally shared assumptions about different social groups can produce and reinforce societal disparities.

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

“…In this sense, establishing ecological validity is not complete yet. Towards establishing external validity, future research could aim to generalize our cooperation effects to other relevant behaviors such as fair distribution and generous donation (Jenkins, Karashchuk, Zhu, & Hsu, 2018). Future research should further examine internal validity (i.e., causation) by manipulating rather than, as here, measuring perceived other-self similarity in agency and beliefs.…”

People from lower social classes elicit greater prosociality: Compassion and deservingness matter

“…Therefore, we examined compassion as a potential mediator for the effect of target class on prosocial behavior. Although Van Doesum et al (2017) did not detect such mediation, basic stereotypical dimensions of warmth and competence could alternatively explain different behavior toward different social groups (Fiske, 2018;Jenkins et al, 2018). Hence, we explored these and other fundamental other-oriented perceptions, including similarity.…”

Neural representations of others’ traits predict social decisions

“…Mounting evidence from social psychology shows that stereotypes are structured along core dimensions of trait perception, such as warmth, or the degree to which people have good intentions toward others, and competence, or the degree to which people are capable of acting on their intentions 6,8 . Recently, we adopted a novel modeling approach that enabled us to characterize empirically how these trait perceptions contribute to people's decisions about how to treat others 7 . In a modified Dictator game, people made monetary allocation decisions between themselves and other individuals (recipients) from various social groups [9][10][11] .…”