Identity and prejudice in everyday interactions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wilhelm Hofmann, since 1/2023
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464524346

The social psychology of intergroup relations is dominated by studies of “us” versus “them”: we study racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and other forms of biases, but rarely account for the fact that every individual simultaneously belongs to multiple social groups. The proposed project will address this gap by studying how our and others’ multiple intersecting group memberships contribute to our experiences of everyday interactions. How do we form impressions of others when we are aware of their multiple membership groups? How do our own multiple identities and attitudes factor into our decisions about whom to interact with? Why do some group memberships elicit more prejudice and discriminatory behavior than others? The proposed program combines three research lines. Subproject A aims to develop an information-based account of prejudice by investigating how people make inferences about individuals from their multiple group memberships. Subproject B focuses on the bi-directional relationship between intergroup contact and attitudes, exploring how our own multiple identities and attitudes direct our interactions with others, and how these interactions in turn change our identities and attitudes. Finally, Subproject C aims to uncover how minority groups cope with everyday experiences of discrimination and how these experiences affect their identification with the ingroup and their attitudes towards outgroup members. Together, these three research lines offer a comprehensive view on the role of social identity and prejudice in everyday interactions.To achieve these objectives, we propose a set of studies designed to increase the ecological validity and applicability of findings: an experience sampling study, factorial survey experiments, and virtual reality experiments. The experience sampling study will provide longitudinal data on participants’ experiences of everyday interactions as they naturally occur in real life. This design with an exceptionally high ecological validity will be complemented with more controlled experimental designs: the factorial survey and virtual reality experiments. Together, these studies will generate insights into actual human behavior, both in controlled and natural environments. This project will provide much-needed evidence on how our own and others’ multiple group memberships contribute to our attitudes and experiences of day-to-day interactions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Lusine Grigoryan, Ph.D., until 1/2023