Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology

9/15/06

Stereotyping

Lee Jussim

David Matsumoto, Ed.

“Stereotype” is a noun and refers to a thing – people’s beliefs about groups (see entry on Stereotypes). “Stereotyping” is a verb and refers to action – the use of stereotypes to judge other people. It typically refers to using stereotypes to judge a particular person. If, for example, people rate the intelligence of a student from a lower social class background less favorably than they rate the intelligence of a student from a higher social class background, despite identical academic performance on identical tests, people’s social class stereotypes would appear to be influencing and biasing their judgments of these particular students. The primary questions addressed by research on stereotyping have been: 1. What types of influences do stereotypes exert on how we judge individuals; 2. To what extent do people rely on stereotypes versus individuating information (see below) when judging other people?; and 3. Under what conditions are people more or less likely to rely on stereotyping when judging other people?

Perceiver, Target, and Individuating Information: Some Necessary Jargon

Everyone in social interaction both perceives other people and is a target of other people’s perceptions. Nonetheless, in order to have a comprehensible discussion of the role of stereotypes in person perception, it is necessary to distinguish the “perceiver” from the “target.” The perceiver is the person holding and possibly using a stereotype to judge the target, who is, potentially, a target of stereotyping. Thus, despite the fact that everyone is both perceiver and target, this discussion, like most on stereotypes and person perception, relies on the artificial but necessary distinction between perceiver and target.

What is the alternative to “stereotyping”? It is the use of individuating information – judging individual targets, not on the basis of stereotypes regarding their group, but, instead, on the basis of their personal, unique, individual characteristics. “Individuation,” therefore, refers to judging a person as a unique individual, rather than as a member of a group, and “individuating information” refers to the unique personality, behaviors, attitudes, accomplishments, etc. of a particular target.

Ways in Which Stereotypes can Influence Judgments of Individual Targets

There are two broadly separable ways in which stereotypes can influence how people perceive a particular target. Biases occur when stereotypes influence perception, evaluation, memory and judgment. Biases alter how a perceiver judges a target but do not necessarily directly affect the target. Self-fulfilling prophecies, however, occur when the stereotype influences perception because it first alters targets’ actual behavior (which is then perceived accurately). Each of these are discussed next.

Biases. Stereotypes lead to many biases in perception, evaluation, judgment, attribution, and memory. Typically, these are stereotype-confirming biases – biases that involve seeing targets as more consistent with the stereotype than they really are. Stereotypes bias perception -- for example, people may sometimes perceive a man as more assertive or aggressive than a woman, even when their behavior is similar. Stereotypes bias judgments -- for example, Whites are more likely to judge a Latino or lower SES defendant as guilty, compared to a White or middle class defendant, even when the evidence is identical. Stereotypes bias attributions – for example, given the same life experiences, Whites will view an African-American on welfare as lazier and less competent than a White on welfare.

Stereotypes also sometimes lead people to adopt different standards of judgment for different groups. People will often adopt a lower standard for judging the athletic performance of Whites, the academic performance of African-Americans, and the math achievements of girls than they use for judging, respectively, the athletic performance of African-Americans, the academic performance of Whites, and the math achievement of boys.

Less frequently (except in the case of memory, where this is common), there are stereotype-disconfirming biases – biases that involve seeing the target person or group as less consistent with the stereotype than they really are. Especially when individuals strongly violate common stereotypes – aggressive girls, successful African-Americans, etc. – people view them more extremely (i.e., as more aggressive, more successful, etc.) than individuals with similar characteristics who do not violate stereotypes. Sometimes, this pattern simply reflects a change of standard (“tall” for a woman does not mean the same thing as “tall” for a man), but sometimes it appears to represent a bona fide more extreme reaction to a stereotype-disconfirming target.

In the particular case of memory, there is clear evidence of both stereotype-consistent and stereotype-inconsistent biases. People are particularly likely to remember clear stereotype-violations. White rappers, women over 6 feet tall, and liberal Republicans stand out from the crowd, and, as a consequence, are quite memorable. On the other hand, when people do not have a clear memory about a particular target, they often rely on stereotypes to help “fill in the blank.” Without a clear memory of a particular Republican’s stand on taxes, a politically knowledgeable perceiver is likely to guess “wants to cut them.”

Self-fulfilling prophecies. A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when one person’s originally false expectation regarding a second person leads that first person to act in such a manner as to cause the second person to confirm the (originally false but now true) expectation. Because stereotypes regarding a group may sometimes lead people to develop false expectations for a particular individual, they have potential to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Indeed some of the most classic and influential studies of self-fulfilling prophecies in the experimental social psychological research literature have involved demonstrating the potentially self-fulfilling effects of stereotypes involving race, sex, and physical attractiveness. For example, in simulated job interviews, stereotypes have led African-Americans and women to perform objectively worse than, respectively, Whites and men.

Similarly, school-age children tend to perform at school at levels consistent with their parents’ sex stereotypes – if the parents think students of their child’s gender are superior at math, their child does better; if the parents think students of the other gender are superior at math, their child does worse.

To What Extent Do Stereotypes Bias Judgments?

Bias. Stereotypes produce both biases and self-fulfilling prophecies, at least sometimes. In fact, so much research has found evidence of stereotypes biasing person perception, judgment, and memory that some researchers have suggested that stereotypes are a “default” basis for person perception (this is the idea that people routinely rely on stereotypes rather than individuating information, except under relatively unusual or infrequent circumstances). Consequently, a selective reading of the evidence can lead to a very compelling story about the power and pervasiveness of the biases produced by stereotypes, along the following lines: “Stereotypes influence judgment, they influence attribution, they influence memory, and the even change objective reality!”

Such a story would be “true” in the sense that none of its component claims are false, but it would also be woefully incomplete. This is because this compelling story systematically ignores the very large number of studies that show little or no evidence of stereotypes biasing perception of leading to self-fulfilling prophecies. To date, over 300 studies of the role of stereotypes in person perception have been performed, and these have been subjected to multiple meta-analyses (a sophisticated statistical technique designed to obtain the overall, average effect sizes obtained from multiple studies performed on similar or related topics). The bottom line from the meta-analyses is that, despite the existence of some very compelling individual studies, on average, the overall influence of stereotypes on person perception is quite modest, corresponding to a correlation of .10 between target group and judgments.

This means that, on average, stereotypes substantially affect about 5% of people’s judgments about individuals, which, of course, is the same thing as not substantially affecting 95% of their judgments. It can also be viewed as meaning that a one standard deviation change in a stereotype-based expectation for a target leads, on average, to a one tenth of one standard deviation change in perceivers’ judgments of a target. Such an effect is about one half the size of the typical effect found in social psychology. This means that, although stereotypes can and sometimes do have wide-ranging influences on perception and judgment, typically, such effects are modest.

This is in stark contrast to the strong, robust effects of individuating information. Nearly all studies that have compared effects of stereotypes to that of individuating information find larger – and, typically, much larger – effects of individuating information. Meta-analyses have shown that individuating information typically correlates about .70 with judgment and perception. This means that individuating information affects nearly all judgments people make about individuals; it means a one standard deviation change in a stereotype-based expectation produces a seven tenths of a standard deviation change in perception; and it is among the largest effects ever consistently found by social psychologists.

Self-fulfilling prophecy. An essentially similar pattern has occurred with respect to self-fulfilling prophecies. Again, a selective reading of the evidence can be used to craft a story that emphasizes the power of stereotypes, especially those involving race, sex, and physical attractiveness to create their own reality through self-fulfilling prophecies. Unfortunately, however, many of these studies have proven difficult to replicate. In some cases, there have been no attempts to replicate, and, in others, the replications have failed. So what is one to believe? Again, a good answer comes from meta-analyses. In general, perceivers’ expectations have self-fulfilling effects of about .2 on target behavior. This means that, out of 100 targets, self-fulfilling prophecies substantially change the behavior of 10, which also means they do not substantially change the behavior of 90. It means, e.g., that a stereotype-based expectation that is one standard deviation lower than the mean would reduce, on average, targets’ SAT scores by 20 points. .2 is close to the average effect found in social psychology.

Some researchers have argued that these effects underestimate self-fulfilling prophecies in real life because self-fulfilling prophecies may accumulate over time or across perceivers. The argument goes something like this: stereotypes are widely shared so that stereotyped targets will be subjected to inaccurate expectations again and again. Therefore, even though the effects may be small in each interaction, if they occur across many interactions, they may add to one another and accumulate to become quite large. Despite the intuitive appeal of this sort of hypothetical analysis, it has not been born out by much data – the published studies examining the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies to accumulate all find that, in general, self-fulfilling prophecies are more likely to dissipate (shrink, get smaller) over time and across perceivers than they are to accumulate.

Under What Conditions are Stereotypes Most and Least Likely to Bias Judgments?

Because of the potential for stereotypes to systematically harm or disadvantage members of particular groups, research has explored the conditions that increase their effects and those that eliminate their effects altogether. In general, stereotypes have larger effects on perception when people are not well-acquainted with the target, when perceivers have little or no individuating information about the target, and when they have ambiguous individuating information. Stereotype effects are also larger when people “essentialize” groups – when they believe members of groups have some sort of universal “essence” that binds them all together in some way (see the entry for Stereotypes for more details). Stereotype effects are frequently reduced to zero when perceivers have a great deal of clear individuating information about a target.

Stereotyping Can Increase the Accuracy of Person Perception

Not all influences of stereotypes on judgment are unjustified. In many situations, it is reasonable, appropriate, and justified for people to use their expectations as a basis for making predictions about particular individuals and for “filling in the blanks” when faced with unclear or ambiguous situations. First, consider a nonsocial example. In the Northern Hemisphere, it is usually much warmer in July than in January. People are, therefore, doing something quite reasonable if they expect any particular July day to be warmer than any particular January day. This is a reasonable expectation, despite the fact that, sometimes, daytime highs in January are warmer than nighttime lows in July.

This basic principle – that an accurate belief can lead to an expectation that is as accurate as possible under the circumstances – is just as true for social beliefs, such as stereotypes, as it is for nonsocial beliefs. So, if without any additional, relevant individuating information, if people expect any given woman to be shorter than any given man, or if they expect any given doctor to be wealthier than any given janitor, or if they expect any given Latino-American adult to have completed less education than any given Asian-American adult, they are similarly simply being as reasonable and rational (and as accurate) as possible, in the absence of specific relevant information about each target.

Similarly, accurate beliefs can often be appropriately used to “fill in the blanks” when perceiving ambiguous situations. For example, people interpret a fidgety interviewee to be “nervous” if they believe the interview is about sex, but “bored” if they think it is about international economics. So, if people find out that both a member of a pacifist group and an Al Qaeda member “attacked” the United States, they are simply being reasonable if they use their beliefs about pacifists and Al Qaeda members (their stereotypes) and assume that the anti-war activist’s attack was a verbal critique of U.S. policies, but the Al Qaeda attack was something much more dangerous.

Only a very small number of studies have examined whether stereotypes increase or reduce the accuracy of perceptions and judgments, but what they find is most interesting. If the stereotype itself is accurate (see entry on “Stereotypes” for a fuller discussion of accuracy and inaccuracy in stereotypes), “stereotyping” (i.e., using the stereotype to judge an individual) will often increase the accuracy of those judgments, at least in the absence of perfectly clear and relevant individuating information. (When individuating information is perfectly clear and relevant, people should rely exclusively on it for making judgments – as, in fact, most research shows they do). On the other hand, when the stereotype is inaccurate, stereotyping reduces the accuracy of person perception judgments.