Research suggests that members of advantaged groups who feel dehumanized by other groups respond aggressively. But little is known about how meta-dehumanization affects disadvantaged minority group members, historically the primary targets of dehumanization. We examine this important question in the context of the 2016 U.S. Republican Primaries, which have witnessed the widespread derogation and dehumanization of Mexican immigrants and Muslims. Two initial studies document that: Americans blatantly dehumanize Mexican immigrants and Muslims, this dehumanization uniquely predicts support for aggressive policies proposed by Republican nominees, and dehumanization is highly associated with supporting Republican candidates (especially Donald Trump). Two further studies show that, in this climate, Latinos and Muslims in the U.S. feel heavily dehumanized, which predicts hostile responses including support for violent versus non-violent collective action and unwillingness to assist counter-terrorism efforts. Our results extend theorizing on dehumanization, and suggest that it may have cyclical and self-fulfilling consequences.

Choice is a behavioral act that has a variety of well-documented motivational consequences—it fosters independence by allowing people to simultaneously express themselves and influence the environment. Given the link between independence and analytic thinking, the current research tested whether choice also leads people to think in a more analytic rather than holistic manner. Four experiments demonstrate that making choices, recalling choices, and viewing others make choices leads people to think more analytically, as indicated by their attitudes, perceptual judgments, categorization, and patterns of attention allocation. People who made choices scored higher on a subjective self-report measure of analytic cognition compared to whose did not make a choice (pilot study). Using an objective task-based measure, people who recalled choices rather than actions were less influenced by changes in the background when making judgments about focal objects (Experiment 1). People who thought of others’ behaviors as choices rather than actions were more likely to group objects based on categories rather than relationships (Experiment 2). People who recalled choices rather than actions subsequently allocated more visual attention to focal objects in a scene (Experiment 3). Together, these experiments demonstrate that choice has important yet previously unexamined consequences for basic psychological processes such as attention and cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

Although dehumanization research first emerged following the overt and conscious denials of humanity present in context marked by war and genocide, modern dehumanization research largely examines more subtle and implicit forms of dehumanization in more everyday settings. We argue for the need to re-orient the research agenda towards understanding when and why individuals openly see others as less than human. We review recent research in a range of contexts suggesting that blatant dehumanization is surprisingly prevalent and potent, uniquely predicting aggressive intergroup attitudes and behavior beyond subtle forms of dehumanization and outgroup dislike, and promoting vicious cycles of conflict.

Debate surrounding the issue of inequality and hierarchy between social groups has become increasingly prominent in recent years. At the same time, individuals disagree about the extent to which inequality between advantaged and disadvantaged groups exists. Whereas prior work has examined the ways in which individuals legitimize (or delegitimize) inequality as a function of their motivations, we consider whether individuals’ orientation towards group-based hierarchy motivates the extent to which they perceive inequality between social groups in the first place. Across 8 studies in both real- world (race, gender, and class) and artificial contexts, and involving members of both advantaged and disadvantaged groups, we show that the more individuals endorse hierarchy between groups, the less they perceive inequality between groups at the top and groups at the bottom. Perceiving less inequality is associated with rejecting egalitarian social policies aimed at reducing it. We show that these differences in hierarchy perception as a function of individuals’ motivational orientation hold even when inequality is depicted abstractly using images, and even when individuals are financially incentivized to accurately report their true perceptions. Using a novel methodology to assess accurate memory of hierarchy, we find that differences may be driven by both anti-egalitarians underestimating inequality, and egalitarians overestimating it. In sum, our results identify a novel perceptual bias rooted in individuals’ chronic motivations towards hierarchy-maintenance, with the potential to influence their policy attitudes.

A common belief across several streams of organizational research is that organizations typically conform to consumer-held expectations regarding their behavior. As a result, researchers often attribute instances of organizational nonconformity to shifts in consumer expectations. Acknowledging that many markets are best characterized as brokered markets whereby consumers and producers come together via a third party, this article explores an alternative, relational mechanism that can account for rapid market changes that occur in defiance of consumer expectations. In short, we suggest that consumer expectations may be applied differentially as a function of the way they travel through the market. We refer to this phenomenon as institutional interruption, and define it as the process whereby existing modes of institutional reproduction are temporarily disturbed via alterations to a market's relational structure. Central to the proposed framework is a distinction between two styles of network brokerage: transmission and transformation. Both modes contribute to markets by moving tangible resources, such as goods and capital, from one party to the other. Where they differ is in their capacity to actively transform or block the diffusion of various intangible things—here being consumer expectations—upon which markets are constructed. In an empirical section, we apply the transmission-transformation distinction to help explain growth and decline in product heterogeneity in the global hedge fund industry from 1994 to the present.

Understanding the sources of the social class achievement gap in education is an important step toward ensuring that education serves its purpose as an engine of social mobility. The goal of the current article is to provide a brief overview of the sources of the social class achievement gap as well as interventions aimed at closing this gap. We outline three major sources of the social class achievement gap — individual skills, structural conditions, and people’s processes of meaning-making, or construals — and the interventions that target them. While all of these interventions can effect change, we propose that interventions will be most effective when tailored to fit the specific needs of students and the context in which they are delivered.

Collectively blaming groups for the actions of individuals can license vicarious retribution. Acts of terrorism by Muslim extremists against innocents, and the spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes against innocent Muslims that follow, suggest that reciprocal bouts of collective blame can spark cycles of violence. How can this cycle be shortcircuited? After establishing a link between collective blame of Muslims and anti-Muslim attitudes and behavior, we used an ‘interventions tournament’ to identify a successful intervention (among many that failed). The ‘winning’ intervention reduced collective blame of Muslims by highlighting hypocrisy in the ways individuals collectively blame Muslims – but not other groups (White Americans, Christians) – for individual group members’ actions. After replicating the effect in an independent sample, we demonstrate that a novel interactive activity that isolates the psychological mechanism amplifies the effectiveness of the collective blame hypocrisy intervention and results in downstream reductions in anti-Muslim attitudes and anti-Muslim behavior.

Gain inside insight to help team leaders and team members maximize their success in business. Making the Team: A Guide for Managers combines cutting-edge theory with the latest research and real-world applications in order to help team leaders and team members succeed in the business world. Expected to be published in 2017.

We review recent research that employs an open polities perspective on organizations. Open polities research combines an open systems conception of organizations as intimately linked to their external environment with scholarship that treats organizations as polities—associations of groups with evolving interests and resources that operate within the constraints and opportunities afforded by a formal organizational system. In this perspective, external political environments seep into the internal political dynamics of organizations in various ways, and those internal politics in turn mediate organization-level outcomes in relation to external pressures. We use the framework of the open polity perspective to 1) connect largely parallel literatures at a meta-theoretical level and thus point to ways in which they can inform each other, 2) identify key processes through which internal and external polities are linked and single out organizational dimensions for the comparative analysis of organizations as polities, and 3) identify open questions and opportunities for future research in this perspective.

The most common question we get as researchers and practitioners is: how to instigate creativity in teams and organizations? Some managers are focused downstream, on the development of a product; others are focused upstream—such as how to start thinking big. However, managers often forget about the mid-stream process. In this chapter, we combine insights from scientific research with actual examples and case studies to identify specific stage-setting processes that leaders and managers need to take in order to keep the raft moving through the mid-stream rapids and get downstream, and finally ashore. We point out the key challenges at each point in the creative river and how to leverage the talents of the team and organization.

We consider the fruits of integrating agent-based modeling (ABM) with lab-based experimental research with human subjects. While both ABM and lab experiments have similar aims—to identify the rules, tendencies, and heuristics by which individual agents make decisions and respond to external stimuli—they work toward their common goal in notably different ways. Behavioral-lab research typically exposes human subjects to experimental manipulations, or treatments, to make causal inferences by observing variation in response to the treatment. ABM researchers ascribe individual simulated "agents" with decision rules describing their behavior and subsequently attempt to replicate "macro" level empirical patterns. Integrating ABM and lab experiments presents advantages for both sets of researchers. ABM researchers will benefit from exposure to a larger set of empirically-validated mechanisms that can add nuance and refinement to their models of human behavior and system dynamics. Lab-oriented researchers will gain from ABM a method for assessing the validity and magnitude of their findings, adjudicating between competing mechanisms, developing new theory to test in the lab, and exploring macro-level, long-run implications of subtle, micro-level observations that can be difficult to observe in the field. We offer an example of this mixed-method approach related to status, social networks, and job search and issue guidance for future research attempting such integration.

Recent research shows that audiences sometimes respond to organizational performance in ways that seem anomalous according to prior theory. In this paper we propose that variations in the extent to which an organization conforms to the norms and expectations of a known organizational category can affect the way evaluators construct reference groups, and subsequently shape their responses to organizational performance. In an experiment on investing in and evaluating the performance of a certain kind of financial organization, we show that organizational atypicality increases an evaluator's likelihood of choosing a nonconforming referent for the purpose of making (enhancing) evaluations of the organization's performance. Evaluators' ex ante feelings of commitment toward the organization further moderate this relationship. Our results have several implications for research related to organizational and categorical identity, performance evaluation, and judgment and decision-making.

Historically, dehumanization has enabled members of advantaged groups to ‘morally disengage’ from disadvantaged group suffering, thereby facilitating acts of intergroup aggression such as colonization, slavery and genocide. But is blatant dehumanization exclusive to those at the top ‘looking down’, or might disadvantaged groups similarly dehumanize those who dominate them? We examined this question in the context of intergroup warfare in which the disadvantaged group shoulders a disproportionate share of casualties and may be especially likely to question the humanity of the advantaged group. Specifically, we assessed blatant dehumanization in the context of stark asymmetric conflict between Israelis (Study 1; N = 521) and Palestinians (Study 2; N = 354) during the 2014 Gaza war. We observed that (a) community samples of Israelis and Palestinians expressed extreme (and comparable) levels of blatant dehumanization, (b) blatant dehumanization was uniquely associated with outcomes related to outgroup hostility for both groups, even after accounting for political ideologies known to strongly predict outgroup aggression, and (c) the strength of association between blatant dehumanization and outcomes was similar across both groups. This study illuminates the striking potency and symmetry of blatant dehumanization among those on both sides of an active asymmetric conflict.

The economic decline of the Great Recession has increased the need for a university degree, which can enhance individuals’ prospects of obtaining employment in a competitive, globalized market. Research in the social sciences has consistently demonstrated that students with low socioeconomic status (SES) have fewer opportunities to succeed in university contexts compared to students with high SES. The present article reviews the psychological barriers faced by low-SES students in higher education compared to high-SES students. Accordingly, we first review the psychological barriers faced by low-SES students in university contexts (in terms of emotional experiences, identity management, self-perception, and motivation). Second, we highlight the role that university contexts play in producing and reproducing these psychological barriers, as well as the performance gap observed between low- and high-SES students. Finally, we present three examples of psychological interventions that can potentially increase both the academic achievement and the quality of low-SES students’ experience and thus may be considered as methods for change.

Scientists and inventors can draw on an ever-expanding literature for the building-blocks of tomorrow’s ideas, yet little is known about how combinations of past work are related to future discoveries. Our analysis parameterizes the age distribution of a work’s references and revealed three links between the age of prior knowledge and hit papers and patents. First, works that cite literature with a low mean age and high age variance are in a citation “hotspot;” these works double their likelihood of being in the top 5% or better of citations. Second, the hotspot is nearly universal in all branches of science and technology and is increasingly predictive of a work’s future citation impact. Third, a scientist or inventor is significantly more likely to write a paper in the hotspot when they coauthor vs. working alone. Our findings are based on all 28,426,345 scientific papers in the Web of Science, 1945-2013, and all 5,382,833 U.S. patents, 1950-2010 and reveal new antecedents of high impact science and the link between prior literature and tomorrow’s breakthrough ideas.