K262, CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Hate crime increases with minoritized group rank
You’re invited to join us for the CAPS Seminar with Mina Cikara, where she’ll be discussing her paper, “Hate crime increases with minoritized group rank.”
Light refreshments to follow the talk.
Abstract
People are on the move in unprecedented numbers within and between countries. How does demographic change affect local intergroup dynamics? Complementing accounts that emphasize stereotypical features of groups as determinants of their treatment, we propose the group reference dependence hypothesis: violence and negative attitudes towards each minoritized group will depend on the number and size of other minoritized groups in a community. Specifically, as groups increase or decrease in rank in terms of their size (for example, to the largest minority within a community), discriminatory behaviour and attitudes towards them should change accordingly. We test this hypothesis for hate crimes in US counties between 1990 and 2010 and attitudes in the United States and United Kingdom over the past two decades. Consistent with this prediction, we find that as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian and Arab populations increase in rank relative to one another, they become more likely to be targeted with hate crimes and more negative attitudes. The rank effect holds above and beyond group size/proportion, growth rate and many other alternative explanations. This framework makes predictions about how demographic shifts may affect coalitional structures in the coming years and helps explain previous findings in the literature. Our results also indicate that attitudes and behaviours towards social categories are not intransigent or driven only by features associated with those groups, such as stereotypes.
About the Speaker
Mina Cikara studies how the mind, brain, and behavior change when the social context shifts from “me and you” to “us and them.” She focuses primarily on how group membership, competition, and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to see others as human and to empathize with others. She uses a wide range of tools—standard laboratory experiments, implicit and explicit behavioral measures, fMRI and psychophysiology—to examine failures of empathy, dehumanization, and misunderstanding between groups. She is equally interested in the behavioral consequences of these processes: discrimination, conflict, and harm. Mina Cikara is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and director of the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2010 and completed a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Before arriving to Harvard, she was an Assistant Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University (2012-2014). Research interests: Intergroup bias, emotion, cognitive and affective neuroscience.
About the Seminar
The CAPS Seminar is a monthly series highlighting research by CAPS affiliates and fostering discussion among members of our community.