Intergroup Perception and Cognition: An Integrative Framework for Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Social Categorization

TLDR: The authors provide a framework to understand and synthesize the processes of person construal with the processes involved in intergroup relations, and explore the implications of the activation of these constructs for a range of social judgments including emotion identification, empathy, and intergroup behaviors.

Abstract: The primary aim of this chapter is to provide a framework to understand and synthesize the processes of person construal—early perceptions that lead to initial ingroup/outgroup categorizations—with the processes involved in intergroup relations. To this end, we review research examining the initial perception and categorization of ingroup and outgroup members and its downstream consequences. We first discuss bottom-up processes in person construal based on visual features (e.g., facial prototypicality and bodily cues), and then discuss how top-down factors (e.g., beliefs, stereotypes) may influence these processes. Next, we examine how the initial categorization of targets as ingroup or outgroup members influences identification, stereotyping, and group-based evaluations, and the relations between these constructs. We also explore the implications of the activation of these constructs for a range of social judgments including emotion identification, empathy, and intergroup behaviors. Finally, we describe a variety of well established and more recent strategies to reduce intergroup bias that target the activation of category-based knowledge, including intergroup contact, approach orientations, evaluative conditioning, and perspective taking.