Resource information
Behavioral economics recognizes that
mental models -- intuitive sets of ideas about how things
work -- can bias an individual's perceptions of himself
and the world. By representing an ascriptive category of
people as unworthy, a mental model can foster unjust social
exclusion of, for example, a race, gender, caste, or class.
Since the representation is a social construction,
shouldn't society be able to control it? But how? This
paper considers three interventions that have had some
success in developing countries: (1) Group deliberation in
Senegal challenged the traditional mental model of female
genital cutting and contributed to the abandonment of the
practice; (2) political reservations for women and low
castes in India improved the way men perceived women, the
way parents perceived their daughters, and the way women
perceived themselves, but have not generally had positive
effects on the low castes; and (3) reductions in the
salience of identity closed performance gaps between
dominant and stigmatized groups in experiments in India and
China. Spoiled collective identities need to be changed or
made less prominent in order to overcome social exclusion.
