Abstract/Description

In this workshop talk, I am eager to share some new work that builds on my efforts to understand the relationship between the politics of respectability, in-group policing, and Black Americans’ punitive attitudes (under review). In particular, I propose a new construct for consideration, “perceptions of collective costs”—the sense that in-group members’ behaviors have cascading consequences for the whole. For the first part of the talk, I will outline a new measure that I use to capture this construct, discuss its correlates, demonstrate its distinctiveness from other familiar constructs, and showcase how it matters in shaping in-group members’ attention and reaction to stereotype-confirming behavior. Following this discussion, I will present preliminary results from an experiment that examines the conditions under which collective cost concerns are activated. I will conclude with a discussion of the implications this work has for the study of identity and punishment in the United States and beyond.