Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CEC (The Cognitive-Ecological Challenge of Diversity)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-03-31
The CEC research program offers a novel theoretical model to explain why negative perceptions and stereotypes about different groups and minorities emerge. This cognitive-ecological framework suggests that such attitudes are not necessarily the result of malicious intent but can also arise as unintended consequences of basic cognitive processes and the nature of the information environment surrounding us. According to this model, individuals naturally notice and remember distinctive characteristics that set outgroups and minority groups apart from ingroups and majorities. In the information environment, distinctive traits are statistically likely to be negative, giving rise to negatively biased views of outgroups and minorities at an inherent disadvantage.
Moreover, the framework helps to understand why stereotypes are usually negative. In the context of media reporting, it explains why people often overestimate the frequency of negative traits and actions in minority groups. It also sheds light on why efforts by politicians and journalists to correct these misconceptions can sometimes be counterproductive. The ERC Starting Grant enables our research team to rigorously test this theoretical framework with the aim of providing a deeper, more nuanced perspective on the societal challenges of diversity and to provide novel solutions to overcome intergroup conflict and foster peace and cooperation.
We have also begun working on several novel research questions related to our CEC project. In these projects, we collaborate with several researchers inside and outside the EU. One project further examines how interpersonal trust is influenced by the number of groups in the social environment. Our studies have found that a larger number of (minimal) groups increases intergroup bias with regard to the perceived trustworthiness of group members. Another line of research has found that attitudes towards social groups are more strongly influenced by individual experiences with group members than by aggregated descriptions of the positivity or negativity of group members' behavior (e.g. news reporting). These findings provide another cognitive-ecological explanation for why people often hold more positive attitudes towards groups they encounter on a daily basis (e.g. ingorups and majorites), and why descriptive interventions that label minorities and outgroups as positive, are often ineffective.
In the remainder of the project, we expect to further confirm our model and to answer a number of open questions regarding the generality of our findings and its implications, the robustness of our model’s assumptions, and the effectiveness of potential interventions to reduce intergroup bias and stereotype negativity. Lastly, we will address the domain of news reporting where our model helps to identify and explain a “minority dilemma”. Accordingly, negative events (e.g. crimes) are overrepresented in the news because these are distinct events, and minority group labels (e.g. “Muslim terrorist”) are also overrepresented because minority group membership is a distinct attribute as well. Consequently, people often form the impression from news reporting that minority groups are dangerous, or otherwise negative. When news outlets decide to not report group labels, this can create a backlash, as news recipients consider the identification of minority group members informative. In the final step, we will use our cognitive-ecological model to develop and test several possible solutions to this minority dilemma in news reporting.