Investigating the Interdependence of Attitudes Toward Social Groups

The logics that inform Americans’ attitudes towards various social groups in society have major implications for solidarity and support for public policies.

Principal Investigator

Pundits, pollsters, and academics have long expressed concerns about America fragmenting into hostile subgroups. While policy preferences have long been an important perceived source of this division, recent social science research has emphasized the role of group identity and affect in exacerbating political polarization. Since Americans commonly associate party membership with other social identities (such as racial minorities with the Democratic party or white Evangelicals with the Republican party), partisan antipathy may inform attitudes towards other social groups.

In this project, Jordan Brensinger and Ramina Sotoudeh draw on national survey data and computational methods to investigate the networked structure of Americans’ attitudes towards a wide range of social groups.