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Bibliografia
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Keywords
XENOPHOBIA, COGNITIVE ANALYSIS, COMPUTATIONAL MODELS, GROUP IDENTITY, PERUASION, SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS, CULTURAL SENSITIVITY, POLITICAL DISCOURSE, SOCIAL INTEGRATION

Representations of foreigners and their influence on interethnic relationships: cognitive bases, social dynamics, cultural differences.

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Abstract
This project addresses the individual, social and political representations of foreigners and the birth, development, and spreading of xenophobic thought from a cognitive, psychosocial, and sociological perspective. Accordingly, it is a multi-level project, and we will try to manage the complexity that is intrinsic in understanding micro-macrolevel interactions by capitalizing on system dytnamics' theoretical tools and software, and on computational simulations of society. Beyond its theoretical scope, the project has a practical operational value: whilst the first unit is mostly theoretical, the second and third units will also apply innovative tools and approaches in order to develop effetive actions for enhancing inclusion and reducing interethnic conflicts in contemporary Italy, and for devising practical guidelines to design similar actions in the future.

Principal Investigator
Paolo Cherubini Università degli Studi di MILANO-BICOCCA
Research Objectives
This research program deals with how foreigners are represented in Italian society and aims to develop a multidisciplinary and multilevel analysis which is original, innovative, and integrates the most recent developments in cognitive science, social psychology, community psychology and sociology. We believe that only an integrated approach is capable of illustrating the complex relationships between the micro-level (i.e. individual representations) and the macro-level (i.e. social and cultural representations). Although our scientific objective is two-fold (on the one hand to shed light on the cognitive and social genesis of cultural differences connoting ethnic groups in their dealings with one another, and on the other hand to develop a new methodology for a multilevel analysis), the operational objective consists in developing tools which can be used to identify strategies promoting social inclusion and intercultural learning processes.
The importance of these matters clearly emerges for various reasons:
a) Firstly, the European political space which is organized on the basis of geographical territory (a system of Nation-States, each with its own borders) has always implied attributing sovereignty to specific ethno-political groups thanks to the creation of internally homogeneous (or presumed such) national identities, and establishing the necessary criteria in order to define the most exclusive form of belonging, i.e. that of citizenship (Donnan &amp >>>

Timescale
24 months
National and international background
Our theoretical framework involve contributions from different research fields (cognitive psychology, social psychology, community psychology, sociology and cognitive science).

With respect to cognitive psychology, the relevant scientific literature includes studies on:
a) Inductive thinking, specifically the reasoning mechanisms behind the generation of hypotheses, and the apportionment of a-priori support to them. Of particular concern is the literature on associative learning (e.g. Cheng e Novick, 1992; Shanks, 1995), with specific attention to inductions based on a single instance (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, and Thagard, 1986); the literature on illusory correlations, including those caused by sampling biases (e.g. Fiedler, 2000), faulty encoding of incoming information (e.g. Hamilton, Dougan,and Troiler, 1985), errors in evaluating the support approtioned by each piece of evidence (e.g. Mandel and Lehman, 1998), or pre-existing beliefs (e.g. Chapman e Chapman, 1969); the literature on human sensitivity to the information content of a set of data (e.g. Cherubini, Castelvecchio, and Cherubini, 2005).
b) Hypothesis-testing and belief-revision strategies, with a specific focus on the different components of confirmation biases (Nickerson, 2002): i.e., the unwillingness to seek falsificatory evidence (e.g. Wason, 1960); the positive-testing strategy (e.g. Klayman and Ha, 1987); the tendency to take ambiguous evidence as confirming evidence (Ross >>>