The Motivated Creation and Use of Social Categories

Social categorization is often framed as the antecedent to stereotyping, with perceivers rationally sorting the social world on the basis of perceptually salient categories before applying biased beliefs about those categories. Here, I instead suggest that both the construction and use of social categories are themselves subject to motivational influences. In chapter 2, I present a theory of how motivations derived from structural sources shape the social categories that people form. I argue that motivations to maintain shared schemas and resource distributions influence social attention, such that perceivers will attend to a given dimension (e.g., race or gender) insofar as doing so fits within their motivations. Drawing from classic conceptualizations of social structure as the interplay of schemas and resources, I focus on how the motivations for shared schemas and for material benefits may shape attention to social category dimensions. I outline potential cognitive mechanisms through which these motivations may act, before discussing the implications of the model. In chapter 3, I examine how environmental factors interact with motivations to shape reliance on social categories. Across three experiments, I use a computational model of category learning to discover the structure of the category representations that participants hold, allowing me to distinguish participants who individuate targets from those who rely wholly on group-based representations. I find that individual differences interact with the environmental feedback structure to predict individuation: those higher in racism or lower in social justice orientation form more group-based representations of negative targets only when they are in an environment that ties feedback to approach behaviour. Finally, in chapter 4, I turn to motivated effects on the use of social categories, examining how people navigate motivational tradeoffs when making decisions for themselves, ingroup members, and outgroup members. Across four behavioural studies and one eye-tracking study, I find evidence for stronger self-ingroup than self-outgroup tradeoffs, which manifest in both altered attention to information and altered use of the attended information in decision-making. Overall, this work presents an investigation of motivational influences on category formation and use, suggesting that motivations may shape very early stages of social perception.

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Allidina, Suraiya

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cunningham, William

• attention
• computational modeling
• motivation
• social categorization
• social structure
• stereotypes

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/130349

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/130349