What is social categorization and what are stereotypes? - Chapter 3

Why do people categorize?

Human beings categorize the world because they want to simplify it. They create categories on the basis of characteristics. People are placed into social groups on the basis of characteristics they have in common. After creating social groups, beliefs about these groups are created. With these beliefs, people guide their future interactions with individual group members. Keep in mind that people do not always make simplistic judgments. This all comes down to the task one is doing. If people are motivated, they will make thoughtful, complex judgments. Making judgments about others, however, is done by categorization.

Two aspects of categorization are important: the content of the stereotypes people have, which can be measures implicitly and explicitly. Researchers are also very interested in the process to which people form and use social categories. 

Stereotypes belong to schemas. These are structures that contain a person’s knowledge and beliefs about a social group. Both schemas and stereotypes influence somebody’s interpretation about social group members and kind of stir somebody’s expectation about the behaviour of members of a social group.

People don’t remember information in the same way they stored it in the brain. It is remembered generally. The gaps that exist in our brain are filled in with our expectations (from experiences and beliefs). So situational factors can influence how we perceive and remember a person. Stereotyping is an outcome of information processing.

What are types of categorization?

There are general social groups, like the races (Black people and White people) and specific groups (like priests and teachers). The categorization process is different for these two groups.

Basic social categories are categories for which a lot of information is available in memory. Examples of this are gender, age and race. When people know someone’s basis social category, they can draw conclusions about this person. When these categories can’t be easily determined, people feel confused. They don’t know what to do or how to interact with this person.

There are also other social categories that influence how people react towards each other. Attractive people are treated differently than unattractive people. Other examples are religion, sexual orientation and disability. We all have stereotypes about this. We also make snap judgments on facial expressions, posture and even colours (people who wear white are good, people who wear black are evil).

What are subtypes?

People notice basic category information first. But people tend to give more weight to some social categories than to others. People find knowing another’s sex more important than knowing another’s race. But people can notice more than one category at a time. When they do, they use a single category, like black man. This represents both basic categories and is called subtype. This leads to a more detailed understanding and a finer judgment.

People divide themselves into groups. The ingroup is always labelled as ‘us’ and the outgroup as ‘them’. You don’t expect that there will be much hatred or different treatment towards another group. Research, however, shows that otherwise. When people were put in one of two groups, they were allowed to give money to members of their own group or members of the other group. They usually gave money to their group, even if they didn’t know/haven’t interacted with their group members.

Sometimes groups are not even based on real differences. Participants were put into one of two groups: the people who had four or less answers correct and the people who had five or six answers correct. So these groups were created from the minimal conditions. This is called minimal group paradigm.

Which factors can affect categorization?

Evidence shows that people often categorize others based on various aspects of their physical appearance, think about weight, disability status, physical attractiveness or skin tone. 

What is prototypicality?

Prototypicality is a factor that has an affect on the speed and ease of categorization of an individual. A person is prototypical when he/she fits the observer's concept of the features characteristics of that category. The more prototypical a person is, the more quickly somebody will categorize that person, this concept is known as racial phenotypical bias. 

What are the consequences of categorization?

In- and outgroups can be created easily, as shown by experiments. Some people who try to avoid outgroup members to be a part of the ingroup use a bias called ingroup overexclusion. It's 'safer' to misclassify ingroup members as outgroup members, than to misclassify outgroup members as part of the ingroup. 

What are the origins of stereotypes?

People can easily create two groups, but how do they come up with the stereotypes of the ingroup or the outgroup?

What is the outgroup homogeneity effect?

People have stereotypes of naturally occurring groups. People see ingroups and outgroups differently. People think that their group members are different from each other and they think that members from the outgroup are all the same. This perception is known as the outgroup homogeneity effect. People think that members from the outgroup look alike, have the same traits and occupy similar social roles. Because of this, evaluations of outgroup members are more extreme than evaluations of ingroup members.

Reasons for the outgroup homogeneity effect are: People have more contact with the ingroup members than with members from the outgroup. Because of this, they have more information about members from the ingroup than members from the outgroup. They can identify their own group members better and will see their individuality better than members from the outgroup.

What are the reasons for the outgroup homogeneity effect?

1. Because people spend more time with their group members, and therefor have more information about them and their unique qualities. 
2. Interactions with ingroup members provide more information about the unique characteristics.
3. People want to see themselves as unique and try to find ways in which they differ from others.
4. Ingroup and outgroup comparisons are made at the group level.

What is the cross-racial identification bias?

This bias suggests that people from other races and ethnic groups all 'look alike' to people who are a part of the outgroup. People's own emotional state can influence this bias. 

What is the ultimate attribution error?

Members of other social groups are treated stereotypically. Because of this, the ultimate attribution error can occur. This means that people think that their own group’s negative behaviour can be explained by situational factors, but that negative actions by members of other groups are due to their characteristics. This can lead to stereotypic beliefs about the outgroup. Positive behaviours by an outgroup are dismissed as due to special advantages or luck. Positive behaviours by ingroup members are attributed to personality traits. The ultimate attribution error can always happen. This effect may be very strong if two groups have a conflict with each other or when emotions run high. The behaviour of a single minority group member can influence how people think about all group members from other groups. When people see one black guy act mean, they might think that every black person is mean.

What is the social role theory?

Some people think that we get our beliefs about social groups by watching the world around us. According to the social role theory, people observe others and pay attention to the social roles they occupy. They associate this role with the individual. This is because of the correspondence bias. This means that people don’t know how much impact situational factors may have on behaviour. People usually think that someone’s actions reflect his/her personality. Because of the social roles we perceive people in and the correspondence bias, stereotypes are created. We usually see mothers as caregivers and they are usually in a lower employee role. Because of this we see women as kind and warm.

What are illusory correlations?

Stereotypes represent a relationship between group and a characteristic (Asians are good at math). Information about a group first needs to be encoded. This encoding can go wrong. This means the illusory correlation. This is the belief that incorrectly links two characteristics (like race and personality traits). This link can arise when you see an outgroup member perform an uncommon behaviour.

How do transmission of stereotypic beliefs work?

Stereotypes exist at the individual level. How are stereotypes actually shared? Well, children learn a lot from their parents. Parents also decide whom their children interact with and what they’re allowed to see on the television. And these things influence the things people learn about social groups. Parents teach children stereotypes directly and indirectly. Racial stereotypes usually are taught through indirect means.

Peer influence plays also a big part in stereotyping. When children get older, peer influence gets more important than parental influence. Peers have an influence on attitudes and behaviour. Research shows that interacting with peers who are low in prejudice; make a person who is high in prejudice more accepting of other people.

This may influence stereotype development by the social learning theory. According to this, people learn about social behaviour directly or vicariously. Directly means that somebody is being punished or rewarded for his/her actions and learns from it. Vicariously means that somebody is observing the consequences of another person’s behaviour. They keep doing the things they have been awarded for or actions they saw somebody else be rewarded for and don’t do the things/ don’t hold the beliefs they have been punished for or see somebody else be punished for. So if children are encouraged to read books or watch shows about characters from different backgrounds (these characters have to be positive though) they are more likely to develop positive racial stereotypes than children who don’t watch these shows or read these books.

What is the role of the media?

Another big source of influence is the media. The media is filled with stereotypes. One research showed that a lot of American movies portray Arabics as brutes, uncivilized and as religious fanatics. Newspapers usually use pictures of Black people to represent the poor. Even when the media presents someone in a non-stereotypical role, they tend to still give a stereotypic picture. When they show a female cop, they usually focus on her attractiveness and not on her bravery. Advertisements also portray people in stereotypic roles. Usually being White is more portrayed than other ethnic groups, as they are not seen too often in advertisements. White people are more likely to be portrayed as the authority figure, in parent roles or spousal roles. Asian Americans are more likely to be portrayed as children and African Americans are more likely to be seen in aggressive roles. Latinos are hardly put in commercials. There is also sex-role stereotyping in advertisement. Men are more often portrayed as authority figures than women and men most often do voice-overs of commercials. Women are more likely to be objectified and young women are seen more in advertisement than old women.

One might say that this doesn’t affect us. But research shows otherwise. Children hold more gender and racial stereotypes when they watch more television. Adults are also influenced by the media. The more news-media adults watched during the war against Iraq, the more likely they had implicit prejudice towards Muslims. Watching more television also related to negative stereotypes of older adults. This is because older adults are mainly portrayed in negative roles. Older adults are usually portrayed as crime victims or they are being ridiculed.

What is the role of language in stereotype transmission?

Stereotypes are also shared through language. There are more expressions describing women’s promiscuity than men’s. This shows that there’s a double standard. Men having many sexual partners is more socially acceptable than women having many sexual partners. Also, people's first association with the word doctor is 'male', so we feel te need to note that it's a female doctor helping somebody. White men don't get those qualifiers. When people use qualifiers for non-traditional groups, it makes them stand out. This increases the chances that they will be categorized on that basis. Words can also mock other ethnicities. In North America people use ‘mock Spanish’. They create words, like ‘el stupido’ to call somebody dumb. This, however, implies that Spanish-speaking people are not intelligent.

Some stereotypes are more likely to be shared than others. This is because people find some stereotypic traits more communicable than others. People also find conversations about these high communicable traits more interesting than conversations about the less communicable traits.

How to define accuracy?

In everyday life people need to figure out if their stereotypes are accurate or not. When a woman takes a walk at night and sees another man, she must figure out if the man is a possible danger or if the man is also out for a walk. An African American student wonders if she will be evaluated on her performance or skin colour by her Caucasian professor. As said before, stereotypes are the products of human information processing that contain a bit of truth. So how big or little is this ‘bit of truth’? Well, it depends on how accuracy is measured. If you measure it by percentage estimates, you look if social group members typically do possess the stereotypic characteristics associated with them. You can also estimate stereotype accuracy by considering the perceived dispersion. If people think that Asians are good at math, they would estimate that there was low variability on this trait. But if you believe that not all Asians are good in math, then you think this trait has a high variability. Accuracy can also be assessed by ranking.

It is maybe dangerous to say that some stereotypes are accurate. People might use that as an excuse to treat people differently, just like White people used to do to the Black people. Even less harmful stereotypes could be used in a wrong way. People think that all basketball players are tall. This does not mean that a school coach should discourage or reject a shorter player. For the tall people it is not always a blast as well that these stereotypes exist. Tall people are usually asked if their dream is to be a basketball player. What we can learn from this is that stereotypes may have a bit of the truth in them, but that relying on them at the individual level may lead to judgments errors.

What is the risk of assuming accuracy?

It is difficult for psychologists to decide whether stereotypes are accurate. Even if a lot of people agree with each other that a certain group has a certain characteristic, this does not mean that these are actual attributes. It is quite difficult to find operational definitions of characteristics. Especially because stereotypes are not based on verifiable demographics but on abstract attributes. Another problem is group comparison. If you want to see whether Black people are more athletic than others, whose ability do you measure? Those of black men or white men? Does the difference also exist for women? Does this also differ if other socio-economic factors differ? These are some of the questions psychologists struggle with.

Another problem with stereotype accuracy is that perceivers have motivations that affect their responses. If somebody feels threatened he or she will be less able to draw accurate conclusions about the characteristics of the outgroup. This person will probably form negative opinions about the outgroup. Another problem for accuracy is the shifting standards model.

This means that judgements are influenced by relative comparisons. Evaluating someone is subjective and one might compare a woman who pushed someone to other women (and might find the pushing woman to be aggressive) or she could compare the woman to people in general (and might come to the conclusion that it is not rare to push somebody and that this woman is not aggressive). This means that assessments are not stable and that assessments depend on the reference point the participants adopt when they evaluate someone. This means thatrating scales are subjective and could not be used as estimates of stereotype accuracy.

The previous text shows that stereotype accuracy is a big issue and psychologists ask themselves if stereotype accuracy should be studied further. It may be impossible to measure stereotype accuracy, but on the other hand science needs empirical research.