We welcomed Dr. Rebecca Neel from University of Toronto on Jan 20th to start off 2020 with a talk at our weekly Social-Personality Colloquium Series (Brownbag).
The name of her talk was “The stigma of perceived irrelevance: A functional approach to social judgment and stigmatization”. Please see her website for more details about her research program!
Abstract: Black women, older adults, obese people, sexual minorities – each of these groups may at times be stigmatized by others. But calling all of these groups’ experiences “stigmatization” masks important distinctions. In this talk, I present a general, goal-relevance model of social judgment and behavior. This model distinguishes between two broad forms of stigmatization: threat-based stigmatization and invisibility. Three projects examine components of this model. Project 1 tests whether a group’s goal relevance is judged along a single dimension (will they help or hurt me?) or multiple dimensions (will they help me? AND will they hurt me?). Project 2 explores how social goals (e.g., to find a mate) interact with cues (e.g., race) to produce threat-based stigmatization vs. invisibility. Project 3 examines invisibility and threat-based stigmatization from the target perspective.