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1. Bridging or Breaking: Impact of Intergroup Interactions on Religious Polarization

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3589334.3645675  

   Chaturvedi, Rochana; Chaturvedi, Sugat; Zheleva, Elena (May 2024, ACM)

   While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important events affect polarization between majority and minority groups in social networks. We compile data on the religious identity of nearly 700,000 Indian Twitter users engaging in COVID-19-related discourse during 2020. We introduce a new measure for an individual's group conformity based on contextualized embeddings of tweet text, which helps us assess polarization between religious groups. We then use a meta-learning framework to examine heterogeneous treatment effects of intergroup interactions on an individual's group conformity in the light of communal, political, and socio-economic events. We find that for political and social events, intergroup interactions reduce polarization. This decline is weaker for individuals at the extreme who already exhibit high conformity to their group. In contrast, during communal events, intergroup interactions can increase group conformity. Finally, we decompose the differential effects across religious groups in terms of emotions and topics of discussion. The results show that the dynamics of religious polarization are sensitive to the context and have important implications for understanding the role of intergroup interactions. 

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2. Some Forms of Uncertainty May Suppress the Evolution of Social Learning

   Turner, M.A.; Moya, C.; Smaldino, P.E.; Jones, J.H. (July 2022, Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Culbertson, J.; Perfors, A.; Rabagliati, H.; Ramenzoni, V. (Ed.)

   Successful climate change adaptation depends on the spread and maintenance of adaptive behav- iors. Current theory suggests that the heterogeneity of metapopulation structure can help adaptations diffuse throughout a population. In this paper, we develop an agent-based model of the spread of adaptations in populations with minority-majority metapopulation structure, where subpopulations learn more or less frequently from their own group compared to the other group. In our simulations, minority-majority-structured populations with moderate degrees of in-group preference better spread and maintained an adaptation compared to populations with more equal-sized groups and weak homophily. Minority groups act as incubators for an adaptation, while majority groups act as reservoirs for an adaptation once it has spread widely. This means that adaptations diffuse throughout popula- tions better when minority groups start out knowing an adaptation, as Indigenous populations often do, while cohesion among majority groups further promotes adaptation diffusion. Our work advances the goal of this theme issue by developing new theoretical insights and demonstrating the utility of cultural evolutionary theory and methods as important tools in the nascent science of culture that climate change adaptation needs. 

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3. Diversity, inclusion and equity in the engineering curriculum: Evaluating the efficacy of a new teaching module, was published in Advances in Engineering Education, Vol 11:3, 2023 (Available at https://advances.asee.org/wp-content/uploads/vol11/Issue3/4_11.3_Sabat.pdf)

   Sabat, Isacc; Nault, Evan; Fortney, Susan; Peterson, Martin; and Banerjee, Debjyoti (July 2023, Advances in engineering education)

   Matusovich, Holly (Ed.)

   Current diversity and sexual harassment trainings often take an informative approach that results in a gap between theoretical knowledge and practical resolutions of ethical dilemmas. Available research suggests that diversity training programs often elicit the greatest amount of change among people with a minority identity and can result in hostility from majority group members. To better prepare all engineering students for modern-day organizations, it’s imperative that universities develop effective approaches at the student level to mitigate these discrepancies. We propose that our novel ethics-based training will elicit positive diversity-related outcomes overall. We inductively explore the differential impact of diversity training across majority and minority identities. Longitudinal quantitative data were collected to examine changes in participant attitudes and behaviors in response to the diversity module. Undergraduate engineering students enrolled in an introductory engineering ethics course at a large Southwestern university were presented with a week-long teaching module on diversity. Survey results were evaluated to measure differences in effectiveness among majority and minority students. The diversity training successfully decreased levels of sexism, acceptance of sexual harassment myths, and increased intentions to confront discrimination. Differences in outcome variables between majority and minority members were found with regard to political orientation, race, and physical and mental disability status. Overall, this study presents a promising new avenue for diversity training scholarship. Specifically, we find that an ethics-based approach to diversity training may be particularly effective for majority group students. 

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4. Names Matter: Implications of Name “Whitening” for Ethnic Minority Discrimination and Well-Being

   https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241247017  

   Biernat, Monica; Zhao, Xian; Watkins, Emily_C (May 2024, Current Directions in Psychological Science)

   Names are important signifiers of identity, but for many ethnic minority–group members, names trigger discriminatory responses. Name anglicization (or name whitening) is one proactive response to ward off anticipated discrimination and to signal assimilation. We review evidence suggesting that name anglicization may reduce discrimination (compared with using an original ethnic name), but it burdens minority-group members and is linked to lower well-being. We suggest a solution to this dilemma: training proper pronunciation of ethnic names. We provide a model of how this simple intervention may improve interethnic interactions, signal inclusion, and reduce prejudice in both ethnic majority- and minority-group members. 

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5. No Preference Left Behind: Group Distributional Preference Optimization

   Yao, B; Cai, Z; Chuang, Y S; Yang, S; Jiang, M; Yang, D; Hu, J (April 2025, The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations.)

   Preferences within a group of people are not uniform but follow a distribution. While existing alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) attempt to steer models to reflect human preferences, they struggle to capture the distributional pluralistic preferences within a group. These methods often skew toward dominant preferences, overlooking the diversity of opinions, especially when conflicting preferences arise. To address this issue, we propose Group Distributional Preference Optimization (GDPO), a novel framework that aligns language models with the distribution of preferences within a group by incorporating the concept of beliefs that shape individual preferences. GDPO calibrates a language model using statistical estimation of the group's belief distribution and aligns the model with belief-conditioned preferences, offering a more inclusive alignment framework than traditional methods. In experiments using both synthetic controllable opinion generation and real-world movie review datasets, we show that DPO fails to align with the targeted belief distributions, while GDPO consistently reduces this alignment gap during training. Additionally, our evaluation metrics demonstrate that GDPO outperforms existing approaches in aligning with group distributional preferences, marking a significant advance in pluralistic alignment. 

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