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Humans have evolved a variety of strategies to protect themselves from harm. Hamden teen, 16, charged as adult in Uber Eats carjacking in Westport.Norwalk zoning board signals support for proposed 1,300-unit apartment complex.What Norwalk residents want to see in new Wall Street corridor.Dolphins spotted south of Darien in Long Island Sound.Police seize large amount of drugs from Portland motorcycle club.How Wegmans plans to handle traffic influx at proposed Norwalk store.Former Stew Leonard’s employee alleges discriminatory and unsafe workplace in lawsuit.Our findings suggest that these kinds of judgments are universal and may be hard-wired into how people process their environments. This pattern emerged regardless of participants’ own demographic characteristics or political stances and even when we used completely fictitious groups, like a made-up organization called “PDL” with a fake logo. Specifically, triggering a sense of value conflict made our study subjects both more likely to perceive those groups as more populous in a place, and to believe that the group and place are somehow linked. Our volunteers were much more likely to overestimate the groups they found symbolically threatening, such as gay people or immigrants, compared to groups that did not seem so threatening, like those with green eyes. In other studies, we described a group of people congregating in a place and asked participants whether they believed the place was somehow linked with those people – for example, a “Duke bar” or “UNC bar.” In some studies, we showed participants demographic information about a small portion of employees at a company and asked them to guess the demographics of the entire business. We asked participants to imagine everyday social spaces, including patrons at a bar or residents in a neighborhood. We followed this up with several experiments, looking not only at beliefs about Black people, but also other minority groups, including gay people and immigrants. We found that the more a survey respondent believed that Black people had different values or a separate lifestyle from their own, the more they believed the population of Black people would increase over time. We began by looking at survey data from the year 2000 that examined 987 non-Black Americans’ beliefs about Black people. Psychologists call this feeling – that groups hold different values and worldviews from the mainstream, thereby jeopardizing the status quo – “symbolic threat.” Four years ago, we set out to answer them.Īcross six studies, we found that people commonly exaggerate the presence of certain groups – including ethnic and sexual minorities – simply because they are perceived as ideologically threatening. Where do these beliefs come from, and why do people make these inaccurate judgments? Perhaps more importantly, why might this matter?Īs social psychologists who explore how intergroup dynamics affect organizational and consumer phenomena, we were fascinated by these questions. And yet, some people seem to hold the belief that these groups dominate these spaces. Neither of these places are actually majority Jewish or gay. We’ve overheard one of our alma maters, the University of Pennsylvania, pejoratively referred to as “Jew-niversity of Pennsylvania,” and one of our hometowns, Decatur, Georgia, disparagingly called “Dyke-atur.” These labels are not only deeply offensive … they are also wrong. This common way of thinking about our environments seemed fairly reasonable to us until a few years ago, when we noticed something that gave us pause.