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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Stereotype

~9 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections
  • A stereotype, in social psychology, is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation a person carries about everyone in a group. That expectation might cover personality, preferences, appearance, or ability. The idea sounds simple, yet the source pulls it apart into surprising pieces. Some stereotypes are conscious, the kind a person knows they hold. Others are implicit, hiding in the subconscious where no one chooses them. A person can sincerely believe women and men make equally good electricians, and still link the job more often to men. That gap between belief and association is one puzzle. Here is another. Research on accuracy gives mixed results. Stereotypes about national origin and astrological signs turned out inaccurate, while gender stereotypes were found more likely to reflect reality. How can a single concept be both wrong and sometimes right? The word itself carries a stranger history, born not in psychology but in a printing shop. What follows traces how these beliefs form, fire off automatically, distort behavior, and how the very term came to mean what it does today.

  • In 1798, Firmin Didot coined the term in the printing trade. He used it to describe a printing plate that duplicated any typography. The duplicate plate, the stereotype, was used for printing in place of the original. The mechanical sense came first, long before any psychologist touched it. Outside of printing, the first reference to stereotype in English appeared in 1850. As a noun, it meant an image perpetuated without change. The leap into modern psychology came later still. It was not until 1922 that American journalist Walter Lippmann used stereotype in its modern psychological sense, in his work Public Opinion. Lippmann argued that stereotypes are rigid because they cannot be changed at will. That claim about rigidity would later face direct challenge from studies showing stereotype content can in fact shift.

  • Stereotypes, prejudice, racism, and discrimination are treated as related but different concepts. In a tripartite view of intergroup attitudes, each plays a distinct role. The stereotype is the cognitive component, the belief, and it often occurs without conscious awareness. Prejudice is the affective component, the emotional response. Discrimination is the behavioral component, the action taken. The three can exist independently of one another. According to Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly, stereotyping turns into racial prejudice when people emotionally react to the name of a group, ascribe characteristics to its members, and then evaluate those characteristics. The possible prejudicial effects are concrete. Stereotypes can justify ill-founded prejudices or ignorance. They can produce an unwillingness to rethink one's attitudes and behavior. They can prevent people from stereotyped groups from entering or succeeding in certain fields. That last effect carries directly into hiring decisions, where stereotypes have been shown to shape real outcomes.

  • Gordon Allport and other early social psychologists assumed that stereotypes of outgroups reflected uniform antipathy. Katz and Braly argued in their classic 1933 study that ethnic stereotypes were uniformly negative. A newer model complicated that picture. It theorizes that stereotypes are frequently ambivalent and vary along two dimensions, warmth and competence. Warmth is predicted by a lack of competition; competence is predicted by status. Groups that do not compete with the in-group for the same resources, such as college space, are seen as warm. High-status groups, those economically or educationally successful, are seen as competent. The four combinations of high and low warmth and competence each elicit distinct emotions. This explains why some out-groups are admired but disliked, while others are liked but disrespected. The model was tested on national and international samples and reliably predicted stereotype content. A more recent approach, the agency-beliefs-communion model, was proposed by Koch and colleagues in 2016. They argued the warmth-and-competence method missed something, since stereotypes are often spontaneously generated rather than rated on traits an experimenter supplies. Asking participants to list and sort U.S. social groups by similarity, they found three dimensions. Agency relates to reaching goals, standing out, and socio-economic status. Beliefs relate to views on the world, morals, and conservative-progressive positions. Communion relates to connecting with others and fitting in. Koch and colleagues later proposed that perceived similarity in agency and beliefs increases inter-group cooperation.

  • Early studies proposed that only rigid, repressed, and authoritarian individuals relied on stereotypes. Contemporary research refuted this, showing stereotypes are widespread and better understood as shared group beliefs held in common by members of the same social group. Full understanding requires two complementary perspectives, the stereotype as shared within a culture and as formed in an individual mind. Stereotypes help make sense of the world by simplifying and systematizing information, so it can be more easily identified, recalled, predicted, and reacted to. Within a stereotype, people or objects are treated as similar to each other as possible; between stereotypes, as different as possible. Gordon Allport suggested why categorized information feels easier to grasp. People can consult a category to identify response patterns. Categorization accentuates properties shared by all members of a group. People can readily describe objects in a category because they share distinct characteristics. And people can take a category's traits for granted, even when the category is an arbitrary grouping. Once formed, two factors explain persistence. The cognitive effect of schematic processing means that when a group member behaves as expected, the behavior confirms and strengthens the existing stereotype. The affective side renders logical arguments against stereotypes ineffective against the power of emotional responses.

  • Correspondence bias is the tendency to ascribe a person's behavior to disposition or personality while underestimating how much the situation shaped it. In a 1999 study by Roguer and Yzerbyt, participants watched students who had been randomly told to argue for or against euthanasia. Although the video made clear the students had no choice, participants attributed the arguments to the students' real attitudes. Law students were perceived as more in favor of euthanasia, even though a pretest found no preexisting expectation linking department to opinion. The attribution error created a brand-new stereotype. Nier and colleagues, in 2012, found that people prone to dispositional inferences were more likely to stereotype low-status groups as incompetent and high-status groups as competent, even after controlling for the just-world fallacy and social dominance orientation. A second mechanism is illusory correlation, an erroneous inference about the relationship between two events. When two statistically infrequent events co-occur, observers overestimate how often they go together, because rare events are distinctive and salient. In a landmark 1976 study, David Hamilton and Richard Gifford had subjects read behaviors performed by members of groups A and B. Negative behaviors outnumbered positive ones, and group B was smaller than group A. Subjects overestimated how often membership in the smaller group B paired with negative behavior, and evaluated group B more negatively, despite the proportions being identical for both groups. A meta-analytic review later showed these illusory correlation effects are stronger when the infrequent, distinctive information is negative.

  • Patricia Devine, in 1989, presented words tied to the cultural stereotype of black people subliminally, then had subjects rate a race-unspecified person described in a paragraph. Those who received a high proportion of racial words rated the target as significantly more hostile. The effect held for both high- and low-prejudice subjects, as measured by the Modern Racism Scale. The stereotype activated even for people who did not personally endorse it. Lepore and Brown, in 1997, complicated the finding. They noted Devine's words mixed neutral category labels like Blacks with stereotypic attributes like lazy. When they primed only neutral labels such as blacks and West Indians, high-prejudice participants raised their negative ratings while low-prejudice subjects tended the other way. The dual-process model holds that automatic activation is followed by a controlled stage, where a person may choose to disregard the stereotype. Activation can also spill into action. Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, in 1996, primed the stereotype of the elderly using a scrambled-sentence test, and those participants walked significantly more slowly afterward, though no word referred to slowness. The same researchers found that subliminal exposure to black faces increased aggression and hostility among randomly selected white college students. Correll and colleagues, in 2002, had participants play a video game deciding whether to shoot a target holding a gun or a harmless object such as a mobile phone. Both black and white participants were faster to shoot armed targets when the target was black, and time pressure made this shooter bias more pronounced. People can also be trained against it. In a 2000 study by Kawakami and colleagues, participants taught to say No to stereotypic traits and Yes to nonstereotypic ones later showed reduced stereotype activation, by learning new positive associations rather than negating old ones.

  • Stereotype threat occurs when people aware of a negative stereotype about their group feel anxiety that they might confirm it. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson ran the first experiments showing this can depress intellectual performance on standardized tests. Black college students performed worse than white students on a verbal test when it was framed as a measure of intelligence; when it was not, the gap narrowed. The effect has since been shown in academics, sports, chess, and business. Attributional ambiguity is a related burden, the uncertainty stereotyped people feel in reading the causes of others' behavior toward them. Crocker and colleagues, in 1991, found that black participants evaluated by a white person aware of their race mistrusted the feedback, attributing negative feedback to stereotypes and positive feedback to a desire to appear unbiased. Stereotypes can also become self-fulfilling prophecies. Word, Zanna, and Cooper, in 1974, found that white interviewers gave black applicants shorter interviews and less eye contact, and made more speech errors. When trained interviewers later treated white applicants that same way, those applicants grew more nervous and earned worse ratings. Self-stereotyping reaches inward too. Correll's work found the stereotype that women have lower mathematical ability shaped how men and women rated their own skills, with men rating themselves higher than equally performing women. The damage stretches into culture and sport. Russians are usually portrayed in Hollywood as ruthless agents and villains, and Russian American professor Nina L. Khrushcheva said, You can't even turn the TV on and go to the movies without reference to Russians as horrible. With roughly 85% of worldwide ticket sales directed toward Hollywood movies, those portrayals travel far, and a 2024 study found sports journalists sometimes aware of stereotypes will downplay their own role in perpetuating them.

Common questions

What is a stereotype in social psychology?

A stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people, an expectation a person holds about every member of a group. The expectation can concern the group's personality, preferences, appearance, or ability.

What is the difference between explicit and implicit stereotypes?

Explicit stereotypes are conscious beliefs a person knowingly uses to judge others. Implicit stereotypes lie in the subconscious as automatic, involuntary associations between a social group and an attribute, such as linking the electrician profession more often with men even while believing both sexes are equally capable.

How do stereotypes differ from prejudice and discrimination?

In the tripartite view of intergroup attitudes, the stereotype is the cognitive component, the belief, and often occurs without conscious awareness. Prejudice is the affective or emotional component, and discrimination is the behavioral component, the action taken.

Are stereotypes accurate?

Research on stereotype accuracy has yielded mixed results. Studies on national-origin and astrological-sign stereotypes found them inaccurate, while studies on gender stereotypes found them more likely to reflect reality. A 2015 study by Jussim and colleagues argued some aspects of ethnic and gender stereotypes are accurate while those concerning political affiliation and nationality are much less so.

What is stereotype threat?

Stereotype threat occurs when people are aware of a negative stereotype about their social group and feel anxiety that they might confirm it. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson first showed it can depress intellectual performance, with black college students scoring worse than white students on a verbal test framed as a measure of intelligence.

Where does the word stereotype come from?

The term was first used in the printing trade in 1798 by Firmin Didot to describe a printing plate that duplicated any typography. It was not used in the modern psychological sense until 1922, when American journalist Walter Lippmann used it in his work Public Opinion.

How do stereotypes form in the mind?

Stereotypes can form through correspondence bias, the tendency to attribute behavior to personality while underestimating situational factors, and through illusory correlation, an erroneous inference linking two infrequent events. David Hamilton and Richard Gifford demonstrated the illusory correlation effect in a landmark 1976 study.

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