Thinking About Group Differences: Ideologies and National Identities

Inherarticle“DiversityScience:WhyandHowDif-ference Makes a Difference,” Plaut (this issue) arguesthat social psychology should put a stronger emphasisonsocioculturalnormsthatguidebehaviorandpercep-tion. One such cultural norm is how ethnic and racialdiversity is construed. Plaut discusses colorblind andmulticultural ideologies as distinctly different ways toapproach racial and ethnic diversity, speciﬁcally be-cause they put opposite emphases on the importanceof group differences. As a general approach, a color-blind ideology advocates treating everyone the samewithout regard to skin color (i.e., we should not payattention to group differences), whereas multicultural-ism stresses the importance of acknowledging and em-bracing differences among racial and ethnic groups.In discussing the research on both ideologies, Plautdescribes that both ideologies can have negative con-sequences, and various lines of research have shownthat they can sometimes lead to more and sometimesto less harmonious intergroup relations.The current commentary has two primary goals. Insolvingthepuzzleofinconsistentresultsofthetwoide-ologies that Plaut presents, one goal is to offer a moresystematicschemefororganizingracialandinterethnicideologies byconsideringtwodimensions alongwhichsuch ideologies simultaneously vary. The ﬁrst of thesedimensions focuses on the degree to which an ideologyacknowledges group differences or tries to minimizethem. As just discussed, multiculturalism and color-blind ideologies clearly differ on this dimension. Thesecond dimension for thinking about intergroup ide-ologies is the degree to which they evaluate outgroupmembersrelativelyfavorablyorrelativelyunfavorably.Crossing these two dimensions results in four differentintergroup ideologies. We have laid out these two di-mensions and given labels to the resulting four ideolo-gies in Figure 1. In the ﬁrst section of this commentary,we elaborate on these four different ideologies, justifyour labels, and explain why we think they help clarifysome of Plaut’s arguments.We think a useful result of this fourfold typologyis that it makes clear the potential downsides of ei-ther acknowledging or minimizing group differences.Plaut goes to some length to make clear many of thenegative consequences of a colorblind ideology, par-ticularly when it bleeds over into its more negativecounterpart: assimilationism. She also acknowledgessome potential downsides to a multicultural ideolog-ical viewpoint. The second goal of our commentaryis to be much more explicit about the conditions un-der which the emphasis on group differences that is atthe core of multiculturalism can also have signiﬁcantdownsides, when it bleeds over into its more negativecounterpart: separatism and segregation. We wish toargue that one factor that may allow multiculturalismto ﬂourish, rather than to deteriorate into separatism, isone’s construal of the superordinate identity of one’scountry and culture. Making use of both recent socialpsychological thinking (e.g., Mummendey & Wenzel,1999) as well as theory in political science on con-ceptions of national identity (Brubaker, 1989, 1990,1992), we argue that some notions of national iden-tity are much more conducive to multiculturalism thanothers.