Exposure to social diversity reduces reliance on heuristic thought and promotes social inclusion.

Does living in increasingly multicultural societies affect social cognition and social inclusion? Crisp and Turner (2011) propose that the experience of “stereotypically challenging” diversity can promote more flexible cognition with corresponding benefits for the social inclusion of minority groups. To test this hypothesis, this study investigated whether thinking about counter-stereotypic social category combinations (representing stereotypically challenging diversity) reduced reliance on heuristics in solving reasoning problems and enhanced the perceived social inclusion of outgroups. Participants were randomly assigned to think about stereotypic or counter-stereotypic category combinations and then asked to complete a series of logical problems and to attribute uniquely human traits to four different social groups. Results show that participants who had previously thought about a counter-stereotypic category combination (female mechanic) avoided heuristic thinking and included multiple outgroups in the superordinate human group to a greater extent than participants who had thought about a stereotypic combination (male mechanic). The findings suggest that perceiving social diversity can not only reduce prejudice but improve cognitive flexibility and de-bias social judgments about integration in multicultural societies.