Jacqueline M. Chen

Culture and Social Support Provision Who Gives What and Why

The present research examined cultural differences in the type and frequency of support provided as well as the motivations underlying these behaviors. Study 1, an open-ended survey, asked participants about their social interactions in the past 24 hours and found that European Americans reported providing emotion-focused support more frequently than problem-focused support, whereas Japanese exhibited the opposite pattern. Study 2, a closed-ended questionnaire study, found that, in response to the close other’s big stressor, European Americans provided more emotion-focused support whereas Japanese provided equivalent amounts of emotion-focused and problem-focused support. In addition, Study 2 examined motivational explanations for these differences. Social support provision was motivated by the goal of closeness and increasing recipient self-esteem among European Americans, but only associated with the motive for closeness among Japanese. These studies illustrate the importance of considering cultural context and its role in determining the meaning and function of various support behaviors.

Motivation to Control Prejudice Predicts Categorization of Multiracials

Multiracial individuals often do not easily fit into existing racial categories. Perceivers may adopt a novel racial category to categorize multiracial targets, but their willingness to do so may depend on their motivations. We investigated whether perceivers’ levels of internal motivation to control prejudice (IMS) and external motivation to control prejudice (EMS) predicted their likelihood of categorizing Black–White multiracial faces as Multiracial. Across four studies, IMS positively predicted perceivers’ categorizations of multiracial faces as Multiracial. The association between IMS and Multiracial categorizations was strongest when faces were most racially ambiguous. Explicit prejudice, implicit prejudice, and interracial contact were ruled out as explanations for the relationship between IMS and Multiracial categorizations. EMS may be negatively associated with the use of the Multiracial category. Therefore, perceivers’ motivations to control prejudice have important implications for racial categorization processes.

Gendered Facial Cues Influence Race Categorizations

Race and gender categories, although long presumed to be perceived independently, are inextricably tethered in social perception due in part to natural confounding of phenotypic cues. We predicted that target gender would affect race categorizations. Consistent with this hypothesis, feminine faces compelled White categorizations, and masculine faces compelled Asian or Black categorizations of racially ambiguous targets (Study 1), monoracial targets (Study 2), and real facial photographs (Study 3). The efficiency of judgments varied concomitantly. White categorizations were rendered more rapidly for feminine, relative to masculine faces, but the opposite was true for Asian and Black categorizations (Studies 1-3). Moreover, the effect of gender on categorization efficiency was compelled by racial phenotypicality for Black targets (Study 3). Finally, when targets’ race prototypicality was held constant, gender still influenced race categorizations (Study 4). These findings indicate that race categorizations are biased by presumably unrelated gender cues.

They won’t listen to me: Anticipated power and women’s disinterest in male-dominated domains

We hypothesized that women avoid male-dominated domains because they anticipate lacking the power to influence others in those contexts. In Study 1, a questionnaire study, male undergraduates were more interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors than were female undergraduates, and this gender disparity was mediated by women anticipating having less power in STEM fields than men did. Study 2 experimentally demonstrated that a lack of female representation within an academic context (MBA program) led women to infer that they would lack power in that context. Consequently, they became less interested in the program and in business schools in general. Our findings indicate that expecting low interpersonal power is an important mechanism by which women lose interest in pursuing male-dominated fields.

Implicit Attitude Generalization From Black to Black–White Biracial Group Members

We investigated whether Black–White biracial individuals are perceived as Black in the domain of evaluation. Previous research has documented that White perceivers’ negative evaluation of one Black person leads to a negative implicit evaluation of another Black person belonging to the same minimal group. We built upon this out-group transfer effect by investigating whether perceivers also transferred negative implicit attitudes from one Black person to a novel Black–White biracial person. In three experiments, participants learned about a Black individual who performed undesirable behaviors and were then introduced to a new group member. White perceivers formed negative attitudes toward the original individual and transferred these attitudes to the new group member if she was Black or Biracial, but not if she was White (Experiment 1) or Asian (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 demonstrated that only White participants exhibited transfer to the new Black and Biracial group members; Black participants did not.

Understanding Diversity The Importance of Social Acceptance

Two studies investigated how people define and perceive diversity in the historically majority-group dominated contexts of business and academia. We hypothesized that individuals construe diversity as both the numeric representation of racial minorities and the social acceptance of racial minorities within a group. In Study 1, undergraduates’ (especially minorities’) perceptions of campus diversity were predicted by perceived social acceptance on a college campus, above and beyond perceived minority representation. Study 2 showed that increases in a company’s representation and social acceptance independently led to increases in perceived diversity of the company among Whites. Among non-Whites, representation and social acceptance only increased perceived diversity of the company when both qualities were high. Together these findings demonstrate the importance of both representation and social acceptance to the achievement of diversity in groups and that perceiver race influences the relative importance of these two components of diversity.

You're one of us: Black americans' use of hypodescent and its association with egalitarianism

Research on multiracial categorization has focused on majority group social perceivers (i.e., White Americans), demonstrating that they (a) typically categorize Black–White multiracials according to a rule of hypodescent, associating them more with their lower status parent group than their higher status parent group, and (b) do so at least in part to preserve the hierarchical status quo. The current work examines whether members of an ethnic minority group, Black Americans, also associate Black–White multiracials more with their minority versus majority parent group and if so, why. The first 2 studies (1A and 1B) directly compared Black and White Americans, and found that although both Blacks and Whites categorized Black–White multiracials as more Black than White, Whites’ use of hypodescent was associated with intergroup antiegalitarianism, whereas Blacks’ use of hypodescent was associated with intergroup egalitarianism. Studies 2–3 reveal that egalitarian Blacks use hypodescent in part because they perceive that Black–White biracials face discrimination and consequently feel a sense of linked fate with them. This research establishes that the use of hypodescent extends to minority as well as majority perceivers but also shows that the beliefs associated with the use of hypodescent differ as a function of perceiver social status. In doing so, we broaden the social scientific understanding of hypodescent, showing how it can be an inclusionary rather than exclusionary phenomenon.

Cultural Differences in Support Provision: The Importance of Relationship Quality

Emotional expression is highly valued in individualistic cultures, whereas emotional restraint is prioritized in collectivistic cultures. We hypothesized that high-quality relationships in these cultures would exhibit the forms of support provision congruent with their respective expectations. Study 1 examined support transactions among friends in response to a laboratory stressor and found that objectively judged relationship quality (RQ) more strongly positively predicted emotion-focused support provision behaviors by European Americans than by Asian Americans. Study 2, a questionnaire study, found that self-reported RQ predicted emotion-focused support provision more strongly among European Americans than among Japanese. Study 3 investigated more indirect forms of support and found that RQ more strongly predicted worrying about and monitoring close others enduring stressors and spending time with them without talking about the stressor among Asian Americans compared with European Americans. These findings suggest that RQ is expressed in terms of support provision in culturally normative ways.

Stereotypes: A source of bias in affective and empathic forecasting

People’s emotional states often depend on the emotions of others. Consequently, to predict their own responses to social interactions (i.e., affective forecasts), we contend that people predict the emotional states of others (i.e., empathic forecasts). We propose that empathic forecasts are vulnerable to stereotype biases and demonstrate that stereotypes about the different emotional experiences of race (Experiment 1) and sex groups (Experiment 2) bias empathic forecasts. Path modeling in both studies demonstrates that stereotype-biased empathic forecasts regarding how a target individual will feel during a social interaction are associated with participants’ affective forecasts of how they will feel during that interaction with the target person. These affective forecasts, in turn, predict behavioral intentions for the social interaction before it even begins. Stereotypes can therefore indirectly bias affective forecasts by first influencing the empathic forecasts that partly constitute them. In turn, these potentially biased affective forecasts determine social behaviors.

Understanding Complexities of Inferences

If, as Allport (1935) suggested long ago, “the concept of attitude is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology” (p. 798), then one could easily argue that dispositional inference must be a close second. Indeed, inference processes have been the focus of social psychological inquiry virtually from the beginning of our discipline. In the 1930s Katz and Braly (1933) conducted what is widely regarded as the first empirical study of stereotypes by giving participants a checklist of adjectives and, for each of several racial, religious, and national groups, asking them to indicate which attributes characterize the group. Given British, what attributes do they have? A decade later, Asch’s (1946) classic paper provided a means of empirically investigating the impression formation process. How? By describing a person (“intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm, . . . ”) and having participants check off other attributes that would also describe the person. In the 1950s Bruner and Taguiri (1954) introduced the concept of implicit personality theory—people’s beliefs about “what goes with what” in the personalities of others—and one of the common methods of studying implicit personality theories was the trait inference method, having participants respond to a series of items of the form: “If a person has trait X, how likely is it that s/he is also Y?” (see Schneider, 1973). During these same times, Heider (1944, 1958) was writing about how perceivers infer a person’s ability (“can”) and motivation (“try”) as they strive to understand the causes underlying that person’s behaviors. Then, in 1965, building on Heider’s ideas, Jones and Davis published their correspondent inference theory, one of the first attempts to theoretically systematize the processes by which people infer the inner attributes of people from observing their behaviors. That work, followed shortly by Kelley’s (1967) seminal writings on attribution, launched the massive amount of research on dispositional inference and attribution processes that has flourished, in many forms, for the last 40 years. Glenn Reeder’s (this issue) analysis builds on this history and takes us in a couple different directions, one looking back and the other looking ahead. First, it returns us to an important emphasis in earlier writings that seems to have gotten lost. That is, a central focus in mindreading is on the perceiver’s attempt to understand the motives and intentions that underlie a person’s behavior. Such an emphasis has a long history in theorizing about social perception. When Heider (1958) introduced attribution he not only distinguished between the person and the situation as the loci of causation but also focused on the role of inferred motivation (“try”) in the perceiver’s attempt to understand the “phenomenal causality” (Heider, 1944) of behavior. Perhaps even more explicitly, Jones and Davis (1965) placed inferences about intentions at the heart of their theoretical analysis of how correspondent inferences are made. As they commented, “The attribution of intentions . . . is a necessary step in the assignment of more stable characteristics to the actor” (p. 222). Jones (1978) later commented that their title “From Acts to Dispositions” was a bit misleading in that “the theoretical statement is actually more concerned with momentary intentions—inferred reasons for action—than with inferences to durable underlying dispositions” (p. 333). Although that may be so, in recent decades social inference research has, as Reeder notes, focused on how perceivers infer those “underlying dispositions,” with much less attention to inferences about motives and intentions. How did this change happen? There are perhaps multiple answers, but the shift probably originated with the important theoretical contributions of Kelley (1967, 1972, 1973), in which the perceiver’s primary concern was in identifying the locus of causation (person, situation). Over time, that focus evolved from studying Kelley’s question of when people make dispositional attributions to a more general analysis of how people make dispositional inferences. But the role of inferred intentions and motives remained in the background. Reeder’s multiple inference model (MIM) analysis brings us back to examining the role of inferred motives in the trait inference process. Second, Reeder’s theorizing provides a framework for investigating exactly those questions. He has assembled a number of clever experiments supporting his approach and introduces several distinctions (e.g., between intentional and unintentional behavior, soft and hard constraints, etc.) that are hypothesized to play crucial roles in the extent to which, and how, motivational factors will be considered by the perceiver. The results of his efforts already make a compelling case that social perception researchers need to increase their attention to these processes if they are to gain a fuller