Sam is moving from Oklahoma to Paris. The differences between these two geographies encompass law, culture, norms, environments, and more. Sam is in a new terrain, unsure of what attitudes to maintain, adopt or jettison. How will this new location influence Sam?

People live in different places, and have different attitudes. In the modern world in particular, social mobility is high and people regularly move to new locations, living alongside people with different attitudes. My research explores the ways in which these different places, and the people around them, might shape their attitudes.

More specifically, I focus on the intergroup domain. My research explores geographies of prejudice – that is, the distribution of prejudice across geographic spaces (e.g., counties, states, nations). I study geographies of prejudice, the factors that cause it, and the downstream consequences of such attitudes. My collaborative research uses a wide variety of research design (experimental, quasi-experimental, longitudinal), big datasets, and analytic approaches (multi-level modeling, structural equation modeling) to test social psychological hypotheses in this domain. I do so in three complementary research lines elaborated on below.

Research Line 1: How norms influence attitudes

My research in this area considered that legislation may also serve as signals of norms. If individuals perceive a law as reflecting the opinions of the majority, then laws can be perceived as communicating a social norm in democratic societies (Tankard & Paluck, 2016). Secondly, if individuals perceive an institution as legitimate, and acting in the best interests of its wards, then laws it enacts may be adopted as social norms (Tyler & Jackson, 2014). Geographical regions have different social norms which may be communicated through and as laws. I therefore explore how the signal of law influences the geographical distribution of group prejudice.

The way that same-sex marriage legalization unfolded in the U.S. served as an ideal way to test whether the passing of such legislation might cause changes in anti-gay attitudes (Ofosu et al., 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science). Different states functionally legalized same-sex marriage at different times over a 12-year period prior to legalization as the federal level. Therefore, I and my collaborators could test whether the trajectory of change over time differed in each state before and after legalization.

My collaborators and I did so using both data from Project Implicit and nationally representative data from the American National Election Studies. I geolocated approximately 1 million participants within their states, and within a multi-level model, observed that the introduction of same-sex marriage legalization resulted in a sharper decline in people’s anti-gay prejudice over time. This paper ultimately received the Gordon Allport award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, given to “the best paper of the year on intergroup relations.”

Research Line 2: Changes in attitudes as people move

What exactly might be considered a “space” can be defined in a wide variety of ways, including physical location, histories, languages, populations, norms, amongst many others. When a person moves from one geographical location to another, often many of these factors are shifting at the same time. To what extent, if at all, do each of these factors influence the attitudes of a person entering the area?

One of my lines of research has begun testing such questions, hoping to describe and test some initial hypotheses, such that future research might build. Specifically, I tracked people’s attitudes over time as they moved across different geographies, and attempted to identify the factors that might be associated with any changes in their intergroup prejudices (Ofosu, Axt, & Hehman, under review). In a quasi-experimental design, my collaborators and I capitalized on students’ natural geographic movement on and off campus over the academic year as they moved between mostly – but not limited to – the United States and Canada. Participants reported their implicit and explicitly measured attitudes toward four groups (White and Black people and Anglophone and Francophone people) at 4 time points throughout the year. The logic was that if local area influenced prejudice to any great extent, peoples’ attitudes would be more similar to one another when they all lived in the same location (in this case, predominantly white and Francophone Montreal) relative to different locations.

Generally, I found very little change in participants’ prejudices across different locations, despite participants going to a wide variety of very different environments. In addition, we ruled out a number of important moderators (e.g., local Black or Francophone population) potentially masking such an effect. While this work did not easily identify regional factors that might contribute to attitude change, we consider it important in guiding future research endeavors in this domain. For example, the study tracked participants for a year, and they spent at least 3 months in a new location. Research hoping to find the influence of local areas on attitudes will likely need to measure attitudes over a long period of time.

I consider this trajectory a major part of my future research plan, as despite the evidence in this project, I do believe that areas help to shape the attitudes of people in those areas. Yet I believe there is much to be done regarding identifying the mechanisms and sources of influence in peoples’ environments.

Research Line 3: Mechanisms

Individuals have a fundamental need to belong to groups (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Major theoretical frameworks suggest we monitor those around us to determine their attitudes, such that we can maximize our acceptance and belonging (Haselton & Funder, 2006; McArthur & Baron, 1983). The perception of others’ attitudes in one’s local area can therefore theoretically shape individuals’ attitudes, and thus, can serve as one mechanism that people might update their own attitudes over time. I have been exploring this question in ongoing research.

Namely, in this research I ask people about the attitudes of people around them. And then, using existing data from a variety of sources, I determine the extent to which people are accurate in their assessments. As an example, in an ongoing project (Ofosu & Hehman, ongoing) I asked participants about the anti-Black, anti-gay, and anti-Asian prejudices of their local region (i.e., county). Using Project Implicit data, I can calculate the actual levels of prejudice in those same counties by aggregating the responses of hundreds to thousands of people in that same county. The results present an ongoing puzzle. People are accurate about the surrounding anti-gay prejudices, but not anti-Black, and anti-Asian prejudices.

Subsequent studies have suggested out group membership as a one of the potential explanations for this effect. When I asked gay, Black, and Asian participants about the same biases around them, they are accurate for anti-gay and anti-Black attitudes, and inaccurate for anti-Asian attitudes as majority group members. Furthermore, I suspect the degree to which there are signals (e.g., LGBT Pride celebrations) available in the environment to convey such local attitudes to be responsible for this difference in accuracy but require results with more biases to test such a possibility. As such, research is ongoing with a wider variety of groups to test whether I can determine when and why people are accurate about some attitudes, but not others. Nonetheless, this emerging line of work does provide evidence that people can be accurate regarding some prejudices, and serves as proof of concept that the perception of others’ attitudes might be one mechanism by which people update their own attitudes over time.