Grolar Bears, Social Class, and Policy Relevance: Extraordinary Agendas for the Emerging 21st Century

Engagement in migrant organizations for immigrant integration: A mixed-method study with Peruvians in Chile

Immigrant communities in Chile face barriers to their integration, in the form of discrimination and social exclusion. Psychology of liberation claims that, when minority groups experience oppressing conditions, community engagement can be a path toward integration. Nevertheless, community participation has been mainly studied in North America and Europe. Through a concurrent nested mixed-method design, this study explores the relation between community engagement and perception of integration of Peruvian immigrants in Santiago de Chile. One hundred and ten Peruvians (age range 19 to 52 years), engaged in migrant organizations (MOs), completed a self-report questionnaire that aims to identify the predictors of integration based on psychosocial perspective (education), acculturation (national identity and ethnic identity), and liberation psychology literature (perceived institutional sensitivity, knowledge of the Chilean culture and laws). Additionally, 18 Peruvian leaders (ages 31 to 56 years) were interviewed in order to explore intergroup relations and organizational strategies that their MOs use to enhance integration. An interesting and novel finding points to the role of a Latin-American identity that appears to have potential negative consequences in maintaining the status quo for the social exclusion that Peruvians currently face.

Assisted species migration and hybridization to conserve cold-adapted plants under climate change

Temperature rise due to climate change is putting many arctic and alpine plants at risk of extinction because their ability to react is outpaced by the speed of climate change. We considered assisted species migration (ASM) and hybridization as methods to conserve cold-adapted species (or the genes thereof) and to minimize the potential perturbation of ecosystems due to climate change. Assisted species migration is the deliberate movement of individuals from their current location to where the species' ecological requirements will be matched under climate projections. Hybridization refers to crossbreeding of closely related species, where for arctic and alpine plants, 1 parent is the threatened cold-adapted and the other its reproductively compatible, warm-adapted sibling. Traditionally, hybridization is viewed as negative and leading to a loss of biodiversity, even though hybridization has increased biodiversity over geological times. Furthermore, the incorporation of warm-adapted genes into a hybrid may be the only means for the persistence of increasingly more maladapted, cold-adapted species. If approached with thorough consideration of fitness-related parameters of the source population and acknowledgement of the important role hybridization has played in shaping current biodiversity, ASM and hybridization could help save partial or whole genomes of key cold-adapted species at risk due to climate change with minimal negative effects on ecosystem functioning.

Prejudice and Inclusiveness in Adolescence: The Role of Social Dominance Orientation and Multiple Categorization

This study examined the relations of multiple categorization and social dominance orientation with adolescents' prejudice against migrants and identification with the human group over time. Participants were 304 Northern-Italian late adolescents (61.84% female, M_age  = 17.49) involved in a three-wave longitudinal study (with 3 months interval between waves). Results showed that multiple categorization was negatively linked to prejudice at a later time, whereas social dominance orientation was positively associated with it; prejudice also negatively affected multiple categorization and positively affected social dominance orientation at a later time. Moreover, prejudice mediated the effects of multiple categorization and social dominance orientation on human identification. These findings have important implications suggesting the construens effect of multiple categorization for enhancing social inclusiveness.

Social psychological research on prejudice as collective action supporting emergent ingroup members

Why does social psychological research on prejudice change across time? We argue that scientific change is not simply a result of empirical evidence, technological developments, or social controversies, but rather emerges out of social change-driven shifts in how researchers categorize themselves and others within their larger societies. As mainstream researchers increasingly recategorize former outgroup members as part of a novel ingroup, prejudice research shifts in support of emergent ingroup members against their emergent outgroup opponents. Although social change-driven science results in valuable opportunities for researchers, it also results in significant risks for research - collective, scientific biases in the inclusion and exclusion of social groups in prejudice research that are not readily detected or managed by traditional controls. We present the Emergent Ingroup Model (EIM) to encourage reflection on shared biases, as well as to spark a broader conversation on how to strengthen our field for a rapidly changing and increasingly global world.

How Social Status Shapes Person Perception and Evaluation: A Social Neuroscience Perspective

Inferring the relative rank (i.e., status) of others is essential to navigating social hierarchies. A survey of the expanding social psychological and neuroscience literatures on status reveals a diversity of focuses (e.g., perceiver vs. agent), operationalizations (e.g., status as dominance vs. wealth), and methodologies (e.g., behavioral, neuroscientific). Accommodating this burgeoning literature on status in person perception, the present review offers a novel social neuroscientific framework that integrates existing work with theoretical clarity. This framework distinguishes between five key concepts: (1) strategic pathways to status acquisition for agents, (2) status antecedents (i.e., perceptual and knowledge-based cues that confer status rank), (3) status dimensions (i.e., domains in which an individual may be ranked, such as wealth), (4) status level (i.e., one's rank along a given dimension), and (5) the relative importance of a given status dimension, dependent on perceiver and context characteristics. Against the backdrop of this framework, we review multiple dimensions of status in the nonhuman and human primate literatures. We then review the behavioral and neuroscientific literatures on the consequences of perceived status for attention and evaluation. Finally, after proposing a social neuroscience framework, we highlight innovative directions for future social status research in social psychology and neuroscience.

Upward social mobility and identity

As psychological research on socioeconomic status (SES) continues to expand, greater attention should be devoted to the influence of social mobility and the dynamic and malleable aspects of SES on people's lives. Status-based identity describes how people's socioeconomic circumstances relate to their broader sense of self and the meaning that they make of their own SES. Such an approach allows for complex study of the challenges and consequences of a change in SES. Research related to status-based identity suggests that although social mobility is often considered a signifier of reduced inequality, upward social mobility may also exacerbate other forms of inequality by instigating a destabilizing sense of status uncertainty that impairs motivation and well-being for class migrants.