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We have seen massive global behavioral change as billions of people radically altered their ways of life in response to COVID-19. Here, we review how research on conformity and deviance can inform understanding of and effective responses to the pandemic. Group identities are critical for understanding who is influenced by whom, as well as how partisan divisions can obstruct cohesive and coordinated action. We identify several questions highlighted by the pandemic, including when people will react more harshly to ingroup members who violate health-protective norms (black sheep effect) or to outgroup members violating the same norms (intergroup hypocrisy). As a working hypothesis, we propose a goal-based approach, positing that differentially negative reactions to ingroup and outgroup deviants are likely influenced by the relative salience of goals to protect ingroup image, enforce group norms, maintain intergroup boundaries, and seek justice for potential victims put at risk by norm-violating behavior.

OBJECTIVES With our rapidly aging population, it is critical to understand biases toward older people and what can be done to reduce ageism. Intergenerational contact can improve attitudes towards older people, but the effect of inclusion of outgroups in the self (IOS) in the context of intergenerational contact remains unexplored. In addition, stereotypes of warmth and incompetence may be affected differently by contact experiences and have different roles in effecting change in ageist attitudes. METHOD In this study, we modeled the relationships between intergenerational contact, IOS, and stereotypes of warmth and incompetence in predicting attitudes towards older adults in a young community sample (n = 302; 18-30-year olds). RESULTS We found that positive contact with one older adult reduced incompetence stereotypes both directly and through an increase in IOS, and both the increase in IOS and the decrease in incompetence stereotypes predicted better attitudes towards older adults. Incompetence stereotypes were a stronger predictor of age-related attitudes than warmth stereotypes. DISCUSSION This suggests that interventions aimed at improving ageist attitudes through intergenerational contact should focus primarily on disconfirming incompetence stereotypes instead of merely increasing warmth perceptions, which could be done in part by increasing cognitive overlap with older adults.

Organizational identification is a theoretically profound and practically important construct. It fundamentally transforms the relationship between employees and their work organizations, because highly identified employees integrate their organizational memberships with their sense of who they are. This transformation enhances highly identified employees’ work performance and contributions to the organization. However, despite considerable research on the benefits of organizational identification for employee behavior, theorizing about this effect and its underlying mechanisms remains underdeveloped. In particular, there has not been sufficient theoretical development regarding the specific types of work behaviors that follow from organizational identification, the psychological mechanisms that underlie these behavioral consequences, or observers’ evaluations of these behaviors and those enacting them. To address these issues, we present a framework of the behavioral consequences of organizational identification as well as observers’ reactions to them. Our framework highlights two distinct motivational orientations that underlie organizational identification, one that reliably leads to conformist work behaviors and one that may lead to deviant work behaviors that violate the status quo to advance organizational interests. Moreover, our framework highlights that reactions to these behaviors will differ depending on the organization’s emphasis on means versus ends. Overall, we emphasize that the benefits of organizational identification for work behavior are not as straightforward or as widely recognized as implied in prior research.

Research has shown that collective angst (i.e., concern for a group’s future vitality) triggers ingroup protective responses. The current studies examined whether group members seek to protect their group by dissenting from collective angst-inducing group norms. We hypothesized that strong (vs. weak) identifiers holding non-normative opinions would be more willing to dissent, but only when the normative opinion elicited collective angst. In Study 1, as predicted, strongly (vs. weakly) identified Republicans who held non-normative opinions about Obamacare were more willing to dissent, but only when collective angst was high. In Study 2, we manipulated rather than measured collective angst and examined a different political issue: the deployment of American ground troops to fight terrorism overseas. We observed the same pattern of dissent detected in Study 1. This research contributes to current understandings of dissent in groups and the motivating power of collective angst.

Humans are continually diverging and converging with respect to each other. Research across many domains suggests that differentiation and integration are aspects of a more complex set of dynamics, and are not step-wise but interdependent and continuous. Research on conformity in particular reveals that divergence and dissent are forms of cooperation, reflecting concerns for both individual and group integrity.

Most rebels have a cause, and the expression of internal criticism and dissent is vital for healthy civic and collective functioning. Here, we review the normative conflict model (NCM), which posits that social identities are key to understanding conformity and deviance in group contexts. The NCM hypothesizes that strongly identified group members are willing to articulate critical and dissenting opinions when they believe that doing so is in the interest of the collective. In this paper, we conceptually advance the NCM by exploring how responses to group norms can be understood from a goal system perspective, conceptualizing dissent decisions as often involving choices between conflicting goals. We review the evidence for this approach to dissent and outline a range of future directions.

We propose that dissent decisions involve a tension between shorter term group stability goals and longer term group change goals. Strongly identified members may be animated by either goal, and their behavior with respect to group norms is influenced by which is currently dominant. In two experiments, we manipulated construal level, a factor that affects goal selection, such that people are more likely to make decisions that further long-term goals at high (vs. low) construal level. As predicted, at high construal level, strong identifiers were more willing to dissent from group norms than weak identifiers; at low construal level, strong identifiers were equally or more conformist. These findings advance understanding of the motivational dynamics of dissent decisions and speak to the nature of depersonalization/self-categorization in groups. Identified members retained individual agency and exercised their own judgment regarding group norms, choosing to deviate when they perceived it to be in the group’s interest.

Not every situation affords the appropriate setting to articulate group problems, and I predicted that strongly identified members would be particularly sensitive to the intergroup context in which ingroup criticism is expressed. In Study 1, strongly but not weakly identified members reduced criticism of their ingroup when communicating with an outgroup (vs. ingroup) audience, and this effect was mediated by concerns for the reputation of the group. In Study 2, heightening the salience of intergroup competition suppressed criticism among group members high (but not low) in the solidarity component of identification, even though they were communicating with an ingroup audience. These findings show that even when criticizing their group, strongly identified members are attuned to the collective interest: they are more willing to articulate problems to an insider than when asked to do so by an outgroup member or when reminded of a competitive intergroup dynamic.

The current research tests the prediction that nonconformity can reflect engagement with rather than disengagement from social groups. We present two studies that contained indices of both nonconformity and disengagement to examine their relationship under different circumstances and to dissociate two forms of nonconformity: individually oriented vs. collectively oriented. Study 1 demonstrates that thinking about how a group norm may cause individual harm triggers a type of nonconformity that is associated with disengagement from the group, whereas thinking about how a norm may cause collective harm triggers a type of nonconformity that is not associated with disengagement. Study 2 investigates the relationship between nonconformity and disengagement among group members that vary in their level of collective identification. We demonstrate that whereas nonconformity among weakly identified group members is associated with disengagement, this is not the case among strong identifiers.

This study examined the relative efficacy of explicit instruction and indirect priming on young children's behavior in a task that required a series of choices between a small immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. One hundread and six 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions involving one of two goals (maximize rewards or obtain immediate rewards) and one of two types of instruction (indirect priming using stories or explicit verbal instructions). Children were more likely to make goal-congruent choices as a result of indirect priming, but there was no effect of explicit instruction, suggesting that indirect approaches to changing young children's behavior may be more effective than direct approaches under some circumstances. These results have implications for understanding the dynamic interplay between bottom-up and top-down influences on self-regulation early in development.

We hypothesized that prospective changes in social identity that involve transitioning out of a currently valued group would be associated with negative expectations regarding future states, but that this effect would be mitigated among individuals who expect to belong to a future in-group of similar importance. Consistent with predictions, strongly identified young adults in two studies projected significantly lower self-esteem/psychological well-being in old age than weakly identified young adults. Critically, however, this effect was fully attenuated if they expected to identify with their future aged in-group when they were old. Study 2 showed that the capacity for projected identification to buffer projected well-being among strongly identified young adults was contingent on their membership in the future in-group being highly salient. Analyses of participants' written descriptions of old age (Study 1) and a valence manipulation (Study 2) indicated that these effects were not attributable to the anticipated valence of future selves/states, but rather to the value placed on current and future group memberships.

This research investigates processes underlying selective self-stereotyping in the context of a future group membership. In two studies a narrative coding methodology allowed us to investigate the spontaneous use of positive and negative stereotypic content in young adults' descriptions of future aged selves. In Study 1, young adults relied more on positive than negative age stereotypes to construct older possible selves. In Study 2, participants asked to describe a feared aged self continued to evidence a positivity bias, such that their descriptions were more often characterized by concerns about missing out on or failing to attain positive age-related experiences than by concerns about negative events stereotypic of older adulthood. This pattern suggests that positivity biases underlying selective self-stereotyping operate at both stereotype activation and application stages of information processing.

Recent research suggests that two psychological factors are necessary for group members to dissent: a capacity to form alternate perspectives on group issues, and a motivation to publicly express them. With respect to the influence of personality variables, Openness to Experience may predispose individuals toward the formation of alternate opinions, while Conscientiousness may motivate the articulation of deviant perspectives once they have been formed. Data across three studies evidenced this interactive pattern such that only among individuals high on Openness did Conscientiousness predict willingness to influence one's group, in particular via expression of dissenting opinions. Effects were not moderated by collective identification, indicating that these personality and social identity level variables can operate independently of one another.

Effective self-regulation requires the ability to consider alternate goal states in order to adapt to shifting circumstances. Previous research on goal reflection has identified goal-type dissociations in brain regions broadly associated with self-projection. Importantly, however, there is a need to distinguish activation differences due to recruitment of distinct processes from activations that reflect common processes with varying levels of recruitment. The fact that different types of goals tend to covary naturally with time allowed us to vary the difficulty of goal reflection across content domains. Participants in an fMRI study thought about promotion or prevention goals at three time points. Goals that varied in terms of content, time-frame, valence, and abstractness but were difficult to construct (relative to other goals) activated an area of dorsal medial PFC, suggesting that this region may support general-purpose projective processes. In contrast, goals that were easy to construct activated a region of dorsolateral PFC involved in domain-general memory retrieval. Importantly, we also observed domain-specific effects of goal type and temporal distance; promotion goals were associated with heightened activity in medial PFC, short-term goals activated precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex, and longer-term goals activated frontal areas, including ventrolateral PFC and orbitofrontal cortex.

Dual–process models of attitudes highlight the fact that evaluative processes are complex and multifaceted. Nevertheless, many of these models typically neglect important interactions among processes that can contribute to an evaluation. In this article, we propose a multilevel model informed by neuroscience in which current evaluations are constructed from relatively stable attitude representations through the iterative reprocessing of information. Whereas initial iterations provide relatively quick and dirty evaluations, additional iterations accompanied by reflective processes yield more nuanced evaluations and allow for phenomena such as ambivalence. Importantly, this model predicts that the processes underlying relatively automatic evaluations continue to be engaged across multiple iterations, and that they influence andare influenced by more reflective processes. We describe the Iterative Reprocessing Model at the computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels of analysis (Marr, 1982) to mo...

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals are less healthy than heterosexual individuals, and minority stress endured by LGB individuals contributes to these health disparities. However, within-group differences in minority stress experiences among LGB individuals remain underexplored. Individuals are more likely to be categorized as LGB if they exhibit gender nonconformity, so gender nonconformity could influence concealability of sexual orientation among LGB individuals, carrying important implications for the visibility of their stigmatized sexual orientation identity and for how they experience and cope with minority stress. Through a meta-analytic review, the current study examined how gender nonconformity was associated with minority stress experiences among LGB individuals. Thirty-seven eligible studies were identified and included in analyses. Results indicate gender nonconformity is associated with experiencing more prejudice events, less concealment of sexual orientation, lower internalized homonegativity, and higher expectations of rejection related to sexual orientation among LGB individuals. Gender nonconformity is more strongly associated with experiencing prejudice events among gay and bisexual men than among lesbian and bisexual women. Gender nonconformity is systematically associated with minority stress experiences among LGB individuals, and future research must measure and examine gender nonconformity when investigating the role of minority stress in degraded health outcomes among LGB populations.

Ageism is thought to be a unique form of prejudice due to the fact that humans change age group memberships as they age and grow old. The current research investigated how increasing the salience of their future aged selves would affect young adults' expressions of prejudice toward older adults. Taking a social identity approach, we hypothesized that young adults' identification with their current age group would moderate the effects of a future self exercise on ageism. In two studies, strongly identified young adults expressed less positive attitudes toward older adults after writing about themselves at 70, perhaps because thoughts of aged selves were threatening to them. Conversely, the future self exercise increased positive attitudes among weakly identified young adults in Study 2. Study 2 also demonstrated the effects of imagining a future self to be distinct from the effects of a perspective–taking exercise. The role of future social identity concerns in the expression of ageism is discussed.

Implicit self-esteem is the automatic, nonconscious aspect of self-esteem. This study demonstrated that implicit self-esteem can be increased using a computer game that repeatedly pairs self-relevant information with smiling faces. These findings, which are consistent with principles of classical conditioning, establish the associative and interpersonal nature of implicit self-esteem and demonstrate the potential benefit of applying basic learning principles in this domain.

We advance the Cooperative Contingencies Model (CCM) as an account for how and why intergroup segregation and disparities (e.g., in education, health, employment, justice) persist despite positive shifts in intergroup attitudes. Life in human societies hinges on cooperation, but decisions to cooperate with others are often risky. The CCM posits that because groups facilitate cooperation, decision-makers often have an instrumental incentive to preferentially coordinate with ingroup (over outgroup) members. Importantly, this incentive operates independently from other contributors to bias (e.g., social identity, ideology) and thus exists even for egalitarians. The CCM further posits, however, that the incentive to preferentially coordinate with ingroup members is contingent on the full set of cooperative requirements (how much people need to cooperate) and cooperative affordances (mechanisms available to facilitate cooperation) perceived in current contexts. Hypotheses regarding when people will exhibit strategic intergroup biases and how they can be reduced are derived from the model.

Shared group memberships enhance cooperation, which can provide a powerful instrumental incentive for individuals to preferentially affiliate and coordinate with ingroup over outgroup members. However, we posit that incentives to preferentially affiliate are likely to be contingent on the full set of cooperative affordances available in an environment. Four studies tested the hypothesis that one particular alternate cooperative affordance – effective social institutions (e.g., rule of law) – can attenuate strategic affiliative biases by enhancing inter-individual cooperation across group boundaries. Multi-national survey data revealed that trust in cooperation-facilitating social institutions negatively predicts indices of affiliative bias, independent of other drivers and forms of intergroup bias. In contrast, national levels of corruption (weak institutions) predict greater bias. Finally, an experiment that manipulated the presence vs. absence of third party punishers or rewarders in one-shot trust games provided causal evidence that cooperation-facilitating institutions can decrease strategic bias among individuals not biased for other reasons.

Research on person categorization suggests that people automatically and inflexibly categorize others according to group memberships, such as race. Consistent with this view, research using electroencephalography (EEG) has found that White participants tend to show an early difference in processing Black versus White faces. Yet, new research has shown that these ostensibly automatic biases may not be as inevitable as once thought and that motivational influences may be able to eliminate these biases. It is unclear, however, whether motivational influences shape the initial biases or whether these biases can only be modulated by later, controlled processes. Using EEG to examine the time course of biased processing, we manipulated approach and avoidance motivational states by having participants pull or push a joystick, respectively, while viewing White or Black faces. Consistent with previous work on own-race bias, we observed a greater P100 response to White than Black faces; however, this racial bias was attenuated in the approach condition. These data suggest that rapid social perception may be flexible and can be modulated by motivational states.

Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal. We had participants make moral evaluations (rating whether actions were morally good or bad) or non-moral evaluations (rating whether actions were pragmatically or hedonically good or bad) of a wide variety of actions. As predicted, moral evaluations were faster, more extreme, and more strongly associated with universal prescriptions—the belief that absolutely nobody or everybody should engage in an action—than non-moral (pragmatic or hedonic) evaluations of the same actions. Further, we show that people are capable of flexibly shifting from moral to non-moral evaluations on a trial-by-trial basis. Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that moral versus non-moral construal has an important influence on evaluation and suggests that effects of construal are highly flexible. We discuss the implications of these experiments for models of moral judgment and decision-making.

This study examined the relative efficacy of explicit instruction and indirect priming on young children's behavior in a task that required a series of choices between a small immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. One hundread and six 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions involving one of two goals (maximize rewards or obtain immediate rewards) and one of two types of instruction (indirect priming using stories or explicit verbal instructions). Children were more likely to make goal-congruent choices as a result of indirect priming, but there was no effect of explicit instruction, suggesting that indirect approaches to changing young children's behavior may be more effective than direct approaches under some circumstances. These results have implications for understanding the dynamic interplay between bottom-up and top-down influences on self-regulation early in development.

Studies have shown that fusiform face area (FFA) activity increases with visual expertise. We present an fMRI study showing that faces from a social category made relevant by an experimental manipulation (members of an experimentally created in-group) preferentially recruited the FFA even when they were matched in exposure to face stimuli from a less significant social category (members of an experimentally created out-group). Faces were randomly assigned to groups and fully counterbalanced so that no perceptual cues allowed participants to visually distinguish category membership. The results revealed a pattern of in-group enhancement (not out-group disregard), such that the FFA was selectively engaged following the presentation of in-group compared with out-group or unaffiliated control faces even when the intergroup distinction was arbitrary, and exposure to in-group and out-group faces was equivalent and brief. In addition, individual differences in FFA activity for in-group versus out-group faces were correlated with recognition memory differences for in-group and out-group faces. The effects of group membership on the FFA were not affected by task instruction to respond to in-group or out-group members and were functionally dissociated from early visual processing in the primary visual cortex. This study provides evidence that the FFA is sensitive to top–down influences and may be involved in subordinate level (vs. superordinate level) encoding of stimuli in the absence of long-term exposure or explicit task instructions.

The normative conflict model predicts that expressions of dissent within groups can be motivated by the collective interest and that strongly identified members may dissent from group norms if and when they are perceived to be harmful to the collective. We present convergent evidence from four studies in support of the model. Study 1 investigated retrospective reports of disagreements and found that strongly identified members reported collectively oriented motives for expressing disagreement within their groups. Studies 2a and 2b provided experimental tests of the prediction that strongly identified group members are willing to dissent when they reflect on how a norm could harm their group but not when they reflect on negative individualistic consequences of the same norm. Finally, Study 3 replicated these effects using a correlational design that measured actual opinion expression in an ostensible online chat room.

Classic minimal-group studies found that people arbitrarily assigned to a novel group quickly display a range of perceptual, affective, and behavioral in-group biases. We randomly assigned participants to a mixed-race team and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in processing novel in-group and out-group members independently of preexisting attitudes, stereotypes, or familiarity. Whereas previous research on intergroup perception found amygdala activity—typically interpreted as negativity—in response to stigmatized social groups, we found greater activity in the amygdala, fusiform gyri, orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsal striatum when participants viewed novel in-group faces than when they viewed novel out-group faces. Moreover, activity in orbitofrontal cortex mediated the in-group bias in self-reported liking for the faces. These in-group biases in neural activity were not moderated by race or by whether participants explicitly attended to team membership or race, a finding suggesting that they may occur automatically. This study helps clarify the role of neural substrates involved in perceptual and affective in-group biases.

Although past research has demonstrated a positive relationship between collective identification and normative conformity, there may be circumstances in which strongly identified members do not conform but instead choose to challenge group norms. This article proposes a normative conflict model, which distinguishes between nonconformity due to dissent (challenging norms to change them) and nonconformity due to disengagement (distancing oneself from the group). The normative conflict model predicts that strongly identified members are likely to challenge group norms when they experience conflict between norms and important alternate standards for behavior, in particular when they perceive norms as being harmful to the group. Data in support of the model are reviewed, mechanisms by which external variables may influence dissent in social groups are elaborated, and the model is linked to contemporary perspectives on collective identity.

Studies of economic decision-making have revealed the existence of consistent contributors, who always make contributions to the collective good. It is difficult to understand such behavior in terms of mutualistic motives. Furthermore, consistent contributors can elicit apparently altruistic behavior from others. Therefore, although mutualistic motives are likely an important contributor to moral action, there is more to morality than mutualism.

This paper examines the role of self-regulation in the decision-making process that produces and sustains dissent. While dissent can benefit collective functioning, the person who enacts it is not always met with a warm reception. We therefore argue that remaining silent in the face of opposition is usually the easier choice, whereas dissent can be more difficult. As with other self-control problems, we posit that it requires self-regulatory resources to take the more difficult road – in this case, to articulate dissent in the face of disagreement. The results of the current study demonstrate that strong identifiers who contemplate the potential harms of a social norm to their group will dissent after they encounter disagreement from other group members, but only if they have not been depleted. Strong identifiers who were depleted and then encountered disagreement were less persistent in their dissent, and the data suggest that this was not to a general increase in selfish responding under depletion. We d...