Stereotype
In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group's personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes make information processing easier by allowing the perceiver to rely on previously stored knowledge in place of incoming information. Stereotypes are often faulty, inaccurate, and resistant to new information. Although stereotypes generally have negative implications, they are not necessarily so; they may be positive, neutral, or negative. They can be broken down into two categories: explicit stereotypes, which are conscious, and implicit stereotypes, which are subconscious.
Explicit stereotypes
An explicit stereotype is a belief about a group that a person is consciously aware of and knowingly uses to judge others. If a person makes a judgment about a person from a group for which the judging person holds an explicit stereotype, their decision bias can be partially mitigated using conscious control; however, attempts to offset bias due to conscious awareness of a stereotype often fail at being truly impartial, due to either underestimating or overestimating the amount of bias being created by the stereotype.Implicit stereotypes
Implicit stereotypes are those that lay on individuals' subconsciousness, that they have no control or awareness of. "Implicit stereotypes are built based on two concepts: associative networks in semantic memory and automatic activation". Implicit stereotypes are automatic and involuntary associations that people make between a social group and a domain or attribute. For example, a person may believe that both women and men are equally capable of becoming successful electricians, yet still associate the profession more commonly with men. Similarly, a person may believe that both men and women are equally capable of being great teachers, yet still associate the profession more commonly with women.In social psychology, a stereotype is any thought widely adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of behaving intended to represent the entire group of those individuals or behaviors as a whole. These thoughts or beliefs may or may not accurately reflect reality. Within psychology and across other disciplines, different conceptualizations and theories of stereotyping exist, at times sharing commonalities, as well as containing contradictory elements. Even in the social sciences and some sub-disciplines of psychology, stereotypes are occasionally reproduced and can be identified in certain theories, for example, in assumptions about other cultures.
Relationship with other types of intergroup attitudes
Stereotypes, prejudice, racism, and discrimination are understood as related but different concepts. Stereotypes are regarded as the most cognitive component and often occurs without conscious awareness, whereas prejudice is the affective component of stereotyping and discrimination is one of the behavioral components of prejudicial reactions. In this tripartite view of intergroup attitudes, stereotypes reflect expectations and beliefs about the members of groups perceived as different from one's own, prejudice represents the emotional response, and discrimination refers to actions.Although related, the three concepts can exist independently of each other. According to Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly, stereotyping leads to racial prejudice when people emotionally react to the name of a group, ascribe characteristics to members of that group, and then evaluate those characteristics.
Possible prejudicial effects of stereotypes are:
- Justification of ill-founded prejudices or ignorance
- Unwillingness to rethink one's attitudes and behavior
- Preventing some people of stereotyped groups from entering or succeeding in activities or fields
Content
Early theories of stereotype content proposed by social psychologists such as Gordon Allport assumed that stereotypes of outgroups reflected uniform antipathy. For instance, Katz and Braly argued in their classic 1933 study that ethnic stereotypes were uniformly negative.
By contrast, a newer model of stereotype content theorizes that stereotypes are frequently ambivalent and vary along two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth and competence are respectively predicted by lack of competition and status. Groups that do not compete with the in-group for the same resources are perceived as warm, whereas high-status groups are considered competent. The groups within each of the four combinations of high and low levels of warmth and competence elicit distinct emotions. The model explains the phenomenon that some out-groups are admired but disliked, whereas others are liked but disrespected. This model was empirically tested on a variety of national and international samples and was found to reliably predict stereotype content.
An even more recent model of stereotype content called the agency–beliefs–communion model suggested that methods to study warmth and competence in the stereotype content model were missing a crucial element, that being, stereotypes of social groups are often spontaneously generated. Experiments on the SCM usually ask participants to rate traits according to warmth and competence but this does not allow participants to use any other stereotype dimensions. The ABC model, proposed by Koch and colleagues in 2016 is an estimate of how people spontaneously stereotype U.S social groups of people using traits. Koch et al. conducted several studies asking participants to list groups and sort them according to their similarity. Using statistical techniques, they revealed three dimensions that explained the similarity ratings. These three dimensions were agency, beliefs, and communion. Agency is associated with reaching goals, standing out and socio-economic status and is related to competence in the SCM, with some examples of traits including poor and wealthy, powerful and powerless, low status and high status. Beliefs is associated with views on the world, morals and conservative-progressive beliefs with some examples of traits including traditional and modern, religious and science-oriented or conventional and alternative. Finally, communion is associated with connecting with others and fitting in and is similar to warmth from the SCM, with some examples of traits including trustworthy and untrustworthy, cold and warm and repellent and likeable. According to research using this model, there is a curvilinear relationship between agency and communion. For example, if a group is high or low in the agency dimension then they may be seen as un-communal, whereas groups that are average in agency are seen as more communal. This model has many implications in predicting behaviour towards stereotyped groups. For example, Koch and colleagues recently proposed that perceived similarity in agency and beliefs increases inter-group cooperation.
Functions
Early studies proposed that only rigid, repressed, and authoritarian individuals relied on stereotypes. However, contemporary research has refuted this, showing that stereotypes are widespread and better understood as shared group beliefs—held in common by members of the same social group. Modern research asserts that full understanding of stereotypes requires considering them from two complementary perspectives: as shared within a particular culture/subculture and as formed in the mind of an individual person.Relationship between cognitive and social functions
Stereotyping can serve cognitive functions on an interpersonal level, and social functions on an intergroup level. For stereotyping to function on an intergroup level, an individual must see themselves as part of a group and being part of that group must also be salient for the individual.Craig McGarty, Russell Spears, and Vincent Y. Yzerbyt argued that the cognitive functions of stereotyping are best understood in relation to its social functions, and vice versa.
Cognitive functions
Stereotypes can help make sense of the world. They are a form of categorization that helps to simplify and systematize information. Thus, information is more easily identified, recalled, predicted, and reacted to. Stereotypes are categories of objects or people. Between stereotypes, objects or people are as different from each other as possible. Within stereotypes, objects or people are as similar to each other as possible.Gordon Allport has suggested possible answers to why people find it easier to understand categorized information. First, people can consult a category to identify response patterns. Second, categorized information is more specific than non-categorized information, as categorization accentuates properties that are shared by all members of a group. Third, people can readily describe objects in a category because objects in the same category have distinct characteristics. Finally, people can take for granted the characteristics of a particular category because the category itself may be an arbitrary grouping.
A complementary perspective theorizes how stereotypes function as time- and energy-savers that allow people to act more efficiently. Yet another perspective suggests that stereotypes are people's biased perceptions of their social contexts. In this view, people use stereotypes as shortcuts to make sense of their social contexts, and this makes a person's task of understanding his or her world less cognitively demanding.
Social functions
Social categorization
In the following situations, the overarching purpose of stereotyping is for people to put their collective self in a positive light:- when stereotypes are used for explaining social events
- when stereotypes are used for justifying activities of one's own group to another group
- when stereotypes are used for differentiating the ingroup as positively distinct from outgroups