Social Cognition, Social Identity, and Intergroup Relations

A Festschrift in Honor of Marilynn B. Brewer

Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781848729353
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136724640
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Perhaps the defining feature of humanity is the social condition -- how we think about others, identify ourselves with others, and interact with groups of others. The advances of evolutionary theory, social cognition, social identity, and intergroup relations, respectively, as major fields of inquiry have been among the crowning theoretical developments in social psychology over the past three decades. Marilynn Brewer has been a leading intellectual figure in the advancement of each of them. Her theory and research have had international impact on the way we think about the self and its relation to others. This festschrift celebrates Marilynn's numerous contributions to social psychology, and includes original contributions from both leading and rising social psychologists from around the world.

The volume will be of interest to social psychologists, industrial/organizational psychologists, clinical psychologists, and sociologists.

1

Rigor with Relevance

The Many Legacies of Marilynn B. Brewer

Robert W. Livingston, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, and Roderick M. Kramer

This Festschrift honors Marilynn Brewer’s distinguished career in social psychology. Since receiving her PhD in 1968, her career has spanned 43 years as of the writing of this chapter, left an indelible impact on the field of social psychology, and earned the conferral of almost every major award that a social psychologist can receive. Putting that career in its proper context is a daunting task because of the depth and breadth of her numerous and diverse contributions. The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of social psychological research on several important theoretical fronts, including prejudice and intergroup relations, social identity theory, sociobiology, anthropological approaches to human psychology, and the psychology of the social self. There were also concerted efforts to develop more applied social psychological theory and research, including addressing problems of prejudice, discrimination, cooperation and conflict, and social dilemmas. Amazingly—or perhaps of no surprise at all—Marilynn Brewer’s work reflects major theoretical and empirical advances in each of these frontiers. Indeed, these contributions are showcased in the chapters contained in this Festschrift.

To properly contextualize the thematic direction of this Festschrift’s chapters, it is necessary to know something about the scientist whom this Festschrift honors. As a student of the legendary Donald T. Campbell, Marilynn Brewer cared about methodology. She recognized the benefits of multiple methods to converge on an idea, and her empirical work employed a variety of methodologies, from ethnography and field research to survey research and basic experimental laboratory research. Marilynn has been truly ambidextrous when it comes to data. Moreover, she has written widely on the proper understanding and creative use of research methodologies for testing hypotheses in the social sciences.

However, just as important for her was the coupling of methodological rigor with relevance (Brewer, 1985)—relevance through deep theory on outcomes and behaviors that offer great significance to the sciences as a whole. Her writings offered a powerful and principled perspective, where she forcefully presented her empirical tests with convincing and meaningful rationale. Moreover, her theoretical perspectives offer substantial contributions to social psychological phenomena— including intergroup relations, social dilemmas, self and social identity, stereotyping, methodology, and attribution theory—a wide range to be sure. However, her contributions reached beyond that—going wider and farther—by offering a redéfinition of and redirection within social psychology itself (Brewer, 1997, 2004). Instead of treating social psychology as a colony of other domains—for example, cognitive psychology, learning theory, or psychophysiology—she argued for a more imperialist view, one in which social interdependence is the basis for shaping human cognition, emotion, and motivation. Her perspective, shared often in her collaborations with Linnda Caporael, builds from core assumptions that the social context exerts a downward force on human psychology.

The duality of rigor and relevance epitomizes the duality of Marilynn’s expertise. In an honor bestowed only upon the top experts in the field of social psychology, who are usually asked to write just one, Marilynn coauthored two chapters in the 1998 Handbook of Social Psychology: one on experimental methods in social psychology (Aronson, Wilson, & Brewer, 1998), and another on intergroup relations (Brewer & Brown, 1998).

Her career communicates not only her commitment to rigor and relevance, but also her commitment to people. Marilynn touched and changed the lives of many graduate students, postdoctoral students, and professional colleagues from America to Australia, Italy to Israel, and Chile to China. As befitting the individual who inspired them, the chapters in this book pay homage to her enduring influence. The contributions range from beautifully crafted and carefully controlled experimental studies to field research and archival case studies. Given the breadth of Marilynn’s theoretical interests, her equally wide-ranging empiricism, and her enthusiasm for multimethod social psychology, the reader will encounter considerable diversity. The content of the chapters is also eclectic and encompasses a diverse range of topics from religion to gender to social dilemmas. Nevertheless, they share a common intellectual legacy, as Marilynn’s contributions to social psychology were also broad reaching.

The extraordinary range of Marilynn’s scholarly career made our role as editors of this Festschrift both exceptionally easy and extraordinarily difficult. It was made easier because Marilynn worked with so many eager and willing students and colleagues over the years. Thus, we encountered no shortage of stellar scholars on whom to draw for contributions. It was made difficult because compiling and organizing such a large contribution into one book was quite daunting. Moreover, we knew from the outset that accommodating everyone who desired to participate in this Festschrift would be impractical—the line was simply too long! We also recognized that it would be impossible to do justice in one edited book when it came to acknowledging all of the fundamental areas and distinct ways in which Marilynn had left her mark on the field. Thus, we knew that there would be sins of omission.

Happily, Marilynn willingly and enthusiastically jumped in and provided her usual perfect assist. She was generous in helping us to shape the scale and scope of our endeavors, identifying some of the major areas she hoped we would cover and offering useful thoughts on how her contributions might best be framed. There was, quite obviously, a great deal of ground to cover; Marilynn’s collaborative work is spread over several generations of students. Indeed, in a very real sense, our collaboration as coeditors reflects the impressive longevity of Marilynn’s career and the diversity of interests it encompassed.

Factor Analyzing Marilynn’s Academic Legacy: Overview and Organization of the Present Book

How does one summarize and organize the multifaceted contribution of a creative and prolific genius (e.g., Shakespeare, Brewer)? One challenge of our tribute was encapsulating Marilynn’s far-reaching contributions, across time, topic, application, and method, into one succinct book. We found it a formidable challenge to attempt a comprehensive volume touching on all the areas where Marilynn made such important and fundamental contributions to her chosen discipline. Nonetheless, we have tried to bring together a group of outstanding social psychologists—some young(er) and some old(er)—but all distinguished in their own right.

The present book is organized into three sections, in accord with Marilynn’s own wishes. The first includes theoretical contributions to social cognition. The second focuses on contributions to social identity and intergroup relations. The third is more eclectic in subject matter, encompassing some applications of social psychological theory and research in the substantive areas in which Marilynn worked or in which her students extended the range of her ideas. As coeditors, we were also pleased that we were able to represent a variety of diverse methodologies in this collection, ranging from traditional laboratory experiments to field studies, archival studies, and even agent simulations.

Fortunately, we were able to persuade Marilynn that this Festschrift would be incomplete without an autobiographical perspective on her life in social psychology. Her reflective essay provides a wonderful counterpoint to the other contributions in this book and functions as the perfect bookend for our project. In her essay, she describes some of the personal influences and scientific imperatives that drove her interests and the approaches she took in her empirical work. Her students and collaborators will treasure it for its revelations and insights into how a scientist at the top of her game thinks and works. We hope the readers of this book will find Marilynn’s career as inspiring as we did.

Personal Reflections from the Editors

Having provided an overview of the contents of this book, we wish to proceed by saying something about perhaps what is between the lines. As an advisor, Marilynn exhorted her students to pursue scientific work with an eye toward both rigor and relevance. Her own example set the high standard for both. As former Brewer advisees, we thought that it would be entirely appropriate (and amusing) for us to disclose never-before-revealed anecdotal evidence of Marilynn’s “rigor” and how it has shaped our perspective of relevance.

Robert’s route to Marilynn was one of the most circuitous imaginable. The mere fact that he ended up being a student of Marilynn Brewer is a testament to the far-reaching relevance of her work. Being a Spanish major who minored in history, economics, and Latin American studies, he was happily ensconced in a PhD program in romance literature and linguistics at UCLA when he first became infected with Brewer fever. While studying colonialism and oppression in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, he developed an interest in what he would later discover was the topic of intergroup relations. He was so fascinated by the topic, and Marilynn’s work, that he decided to leave his program, despite being ABD, to pursue social psychology full time. As an advisor, Marilynn was the quintessential “mother hen,” effortlessly combining warmth, nurturance, and encouragement with discipline, constructive criticism, and tireless tutelage. He has been most inspired by her unshakeable integrity and unpretentious self-assurance, her meticulous and careful approach as a methodologist (i.e., rigor), and her unparalleled ability to think creatively and critically about important questions in the field and our world (i.e., relevance). Marilynn Brewer is a true intellectual—someone who asks big questions and thinks deeply about the answers.

Self and identity were the reasons Geoff attended the Ohio State University in 1996, and the prospect of collaborating with Marilynn was a glorious opportunity. Having read her 1991 paper on optimal distinctiveness theory 2 years earlier, he was excited to work on what he considered to be a new frontier in identity research. However, as he collaborated with her, he realized his interests were changing in ways he had not intended. He began to care more about social identity rather than identity itself, to care more about intergroup contact, conflict reduction, and the conditions that facilitate cooperation. Upon reflection, it is easy to point to Marilynn as the source of this change—her interests were rooted in deeply important topics, and her arguments were persuasive and powerful. He has recalled conversations with Cindy Pickett, another former student and collaborator of Marilynn (and an ongoing collaborator of his), and both agreed that, as Marilynn started to twirl her hair, they could sense the thoughts preparing to march out of her mouth: crisp, clear, and ever advancing the goals of the project. She maybe Australia’s national treasure, but Geoff considers her to be a personal treasure as well, as he has cherished the opportunity to be her student and collaborator.

Rod met Marilynn in 1980, when he was a beginning graduate student in social psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He thought at the time that he was pursuing a doctorate in social psychology in order to receive the training he needed to do the applied work he hoped to do at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He had interrupted his professional work at the NCI to pursue what he thought would be doctoral studies in the psychosocial aspects of cancer. Armed with a PhD, he could then return to that work. In short, a game plan was in place—until he met Marilynn and she became his advisor. She derailed his best-laid plans by making the process of doing basic research so exciting and fulfilling that he never left academia.

Everyone who contributed to this book has a similar story of Marilynn’s impact. The people we approached about participating in this effort to honor Marilynn jumped in without hesitation. Despite their busy careers and lives, no one wanted to be left out. And there was an unusually joyous spirit among all of the contributors—each seemed determined to write something original and special for this tribute. Each was asked not only to describe some of the work they have done that was inspired by Marilynn but also to indicate, in more personal terms, Marilynn’s impact as a mentor, colleague, and friend.

Finally, we would like to conclude by noting that we do not believe that this book in any fashion does full justice to a comprehensive assessment of Marilynn’s many contributions. The breadth of her contributions is so substantial that we were forced to be selective in what we could capture in one book. Furthermore, we suspect that this pipeline is far from dry (even as we were putting the final touches on this book, one of us received a manuscript to review on which Marilynn was a coauthor!). We hope this Festschrift adds to the large and still growing body of work that reflects Marilynn’s extraordinary reach and impact. Although we offer this tribute as a statement of work to date, we would not be surprised if further contributions are forthcoming. Stay tuned!

References

Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Brewer, M. B. (1998). Experimentation in social psychology. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 99–142). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Brewer, M. B. (1985). Experimental research and social policy: Must it be rigor versus relevance? Journal of Social Issues, 41(4), 159–176.

Brewer, M. B. (1997). On the social origins of human nature. In G. McGarty & S. A. Haslam (Eds.), The message of social psychology: Perspectives on mind and society (pp. 54–62). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Brewer, M. B. (2004). Taking the social origins of human nature seriously: Toward a more imperialist social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 107–113.

Brewer, M. B., & Brown, R. J. (1998). Intergroup relations. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 554–594). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

I

Social Cognition

2

Categorization-Based Versus Person-Based Explanations of Behaviors

Implications from the Dual-Process Model

Minora Karasawa

It is practically impossible to nominate Marilynn Brewer’s one representative work because her research has played significant roles in such diverse areas. Nevertheless, in this chapter, I would dare to highlight her dual-process model (DPM, in my own acronym) of impression formation. The original formulation of this model (Brewer, 1988) was invited as the target article in the inaugural volume of the influential series Advances in Social Cognition. Since then the model has been well accepted as one of the major frameworks for the study of person perception. The DPM was among the forerunners on the surge of dual-process theories in various domains of social cognition, including the models of automatic versus controlled, heuristic versus systematic, and spontaneous versus intentional processing (see Chaiken & Trope, 1999, for a comprehensive view). The model has played an integral part of the Zeitgeist in this literature over the past two decades or so.

As the name of this model clearly indicates, Brewer (1988) emphasized in DPM that a perceiver may go through two distinct modes of information processing when forming an integrated mental representation of a person. The first mode was called “person-based” processing, which was assumed to concern unique characteristics of the target individual (e.g., “He is abrave man”). The second mode, “category-based” processing, was assumed to be based on preexisting knowledge or expectations about social categories to which the target belongs (“a firefighter”). The consequence of the latter mode may activate a prototypical (and often pictorial) image that matches the person, such as imagining a well-built, bearded man. This process was called “typing” in DPM. Alternatively, a contrasting effect called “individuation” may take place, such that the person is interpreted as an exceptional case for the activated category (e.g., “a brainy type reading lots of books”).

A notable contribution of DPM is that the model illustrated a variety of ways in which categorical expectations are reflected on the impression of an individual person. Inspired by this emphasis, I will attempt in this chapter to offer an additional vantage point on the issue. Specifically, I argue that categorical expectations play a significant role not only in impression formation but also in explanations of observed behavior. More often than not, people refer to a category or group membership of the actor in their attempt to figure out the cause of or the reason for an observed behavior. For instance, an Asian woman’s high scores in math exams may be more easily accounted for by her ethnicity rather than by her unique individual dispositions such as her exceptional level of effort or interest in the subject. Alternatively, an outstanding performance by a member of a disadvantaged group may call for praise of his or her talent exactly because the category membership augments dispositional attributions (cf. Jones & McGillis, 1976).

In the following section, I will discuss empirical evidence concerning various forms of category-based causal explanations. I will then argue that people not only generate categorical accounts for individuals’ behavior but also construct explanations for acts by a group as a whole. The crucial role that inferences of causality and agency play in animating perception of groups will be demonstrated.

Category-Bas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Rigor with Relevance: The Many Legacies of Marilynn B. Brewer
• Part I Social Cognition
• Part II Social Identity and Intergroup Relations
• Part III Applications and Implications
• Part IV Reflections and Conclusion
• Author Index
• Subject Index