ABSTRACT
During the U.S. Summer Olympics, citizens of each competing country cheer their athletes on to victory. In that moment, when athletes are about to cross the finish line, we are unified in a common aspiration. However, the question of who is American? goes beyond legal status, citizenship and nationality. While this question might be easier answered outside the borders of the United States, the defining characteristics of who is American within the United States remains an issue of controversy meddled with preconceived notions about social, cultural, racial, socioeconomic and other group categorizations, thus transforming this question from who is American to how American is a person. The process through which we judge a person’s belongingness to a certain group over another is called social categorization, which all humans use to define their social world in terms of similarities and differences.3 Unfortunately, distinguishing your group from another group often comes with affective evaluations, often referred to as stereotypes. The objective of this chapter is to understand the defining characteristics of who is American. However, in order to do that, we are taking a step back and looking at the micro level, in a way digging through people’s brains, to understand how we make these evaluative categorizations; how we learn (or maybe unlearn) that a certain group of people are defined by specific characteristics that distinguish them from other groups.
