Impression formation through social interaction: Effects of ethnicity in the Dutch context

Research conducted in the United States shows that White Americans form more positive impressions of White than Black interaction partners through instrumental learning (Traast et al., 2024). We asked whether this pattern generalizes to the cultural context of the Netherlands, which differs in norms for expressing intergroup bias. In three pre-registered studies (Ns= 66/83/80), White Dutch participants played a money-sharing game, based on a reward reinforcement task, with White and Moroccan partners. Although players shared at different rates, average sharing rates for White and Moroccan players were equated. Unexpectedly, and despite anti-Moroccan explicit and implicit attitudes, participants displayed a pro-Moroccan choice preference across studies. Nevertheless, computational modeling indicated the same learning effects of ethnicity as in past research: ethnicity biased initial reward expectations, and these were updated via group-specific learning rates. We discuss potential explanations for this unexpected pattern and broader implications for cross-cultural research on intergroup social cognition.