Stereotyping 1 Cognition and Stereotyping : Emerging Trends

Social psychologists have studied stereotypes since the start of the 20 century. Investigation proceeded at first descriptively, then in a process-oriented fashion that evolved with the broader field into increasingly cognitive explanations, and now marrying those approaches to social neuroscience. The illustrative case is stereotype content, first studied in the 1930s, then dormant as more process-oriented topics dominated, and recently revisited in several models, including the Stereotype Content Model reviewed here. Fundamental dimensions of social cognition, including stereotypes, depend on inferred intentions for good or ill (warmth) and ability to enact them (competence). These dimensions follow respectively from inferred cooperation/ competition and from inferred societal status. In turn, the warmth-by-competence space predictions emotional prejudices and discriminatory tendencies, as evidenced by laboratory experiments, social neuroscience, random sample surveys, and cross-cultural comparison. Cognition & Stereotyping 3 Introduction Cabdrivers know all about stereotyping. Many are themselves minorities dealing with the broader public, so they readily tell anecdotes about riders’ reactions to them. In dealing with the full range of the public, cabbies frequently volunteer opinions about specific groups of people they trust, or not. Their livelihood and safety often depend on first impressions, which people often base on stereotypes. Judging other people by their membership in a broad ethnic, gender, age, or social-class category is a common shortcut that everyone uses, for better or worse. Stereotypers are not intrinsically bad people; we all do it because we categorize people who seem to go together, and we make inferences about culturally associated characteristics accordingly. This cold cognitive perspective describing one feature of intergroup prejudice provides a surprisingly powerful way to understand how we manage our increasingly multicultural, globalizing, cosmopolitan daily experiences. Social psychologists have studied stereotypes since the start of the 20 century. Investigation proceeded at first descriptively, then in a process-oriented fashion that evolved with the broader field into increasingly cognitive explanations, and now marrying those approaches to social neuroscience, as this article will review. The general topic of prejudice and intergroup relations preoccupies easily a quarter to a third of social psychologists, but perhaps this follows from the continued currency of the issues. Foundational Research From the get-go, stereotyping research has documented the existence of stereotypes and the processes by which they take shape (see Fiske, 1998, for a rview). Cognition & Stereotyping 4 Describing the existence of stereotypes commenced empirically with Katz and Braly (1933) handing Princeton undergraduates the names of 10 ethnic, national, and racial groups, then asking them to check which of 84 adjectives best described them. Repeated twice during the 20 century and recently in the 21, much of the stereotype content lingers (Bergsieker, Leslie, Constantine, & Fiske, 2012, Studies 4-5): Italians are consistently viewed as passionate, Chinese as intelligent, and Turks as neither. As an encouraging sign of the times, students are increasingly reluctant to answer the questionnaire at all. Descriptions of gender stereotypes awaited the feminist movements of the later 20 century, documenting female stereotypes’ communality and males’ agency. Other social categories’ images (e.g., homosexuals, elders) are less well documented, until a recent revival of interest in stereotype content, to which we return. Beyond describing group stereotypes, research proceeded to lie dormant for decades. Although racial prejudices were apparent and relevant scales developed, their processes and mechanisms remained vague. Many theories focused on the aberrant, prejudiced individual with murky motives (see Fiske, 1998, for a review). The exception, a brilliant analysis by Gordon Allport (1954), proposed that people categorize people the way we categorize other entities in our environment; Allport coined the phrase “nouns that cut slices. ” This cognitive analysis required no ill intent, just alltoo-human efficient information processing. The normal process of categorizing exaggerates perceived differences between groups and minimizes perceived within-group differences, a theme later developed in European social psychology. Cognition & Stereotyping 5 With the cognitive revolution in psychology generally, the categorization approach to stereotyping processes proved rapidly fruitful (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Consensus developed that prototypes represent social category members by an average, ideal, or extreme case (though concrete exemplars have an important role as well). Consensus also developed that categories activate spontaneously and rapidly but not necessarily automatically, as the accessible category depends on the goal and the stimulus configuration. Goals and expertise also guide the level of category used, from the most global to the more specific. Social categories in particular do not form a tidy taxonomic hierarchy with necessary and sufficient features; rather they are fuzzy sets connected by a tangled web of relationships. Nevertheless, people do often think categorically about others, and nowhere so much as demographic categories that carry associated stereotypes. As an example, social category primes cause stereotype-relevant words to be accessed more rapidly (for a review, see Fazio & Olson, 2003). People have less control over the more immediate association, but more control over judging relevance and reporting beliefs. Categories not only make stereotypes accessible, but also guide stereotypic interpretations where information is ambiguous, and they can cue stereotypeconsistent memory under many circumstances (see Fiske & Taylor, 2013, Ch. 11, for a review). Stereotype-relevant evaluations, emotions, and behavior also emerge. The best-known example of cognitive stereotype measurement is the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Often focused on category names associated with good-bad evaluations—perhaps an indicator of prejudiced associations—it also measures stereotypes. For example, when asked to associate women Cognition & Stereotyping 6 with humanities and men with math, people are faster than with the reverse pairing. Such associations predict decision-making for self (e.g., career choices) and others (e.g., hiring). Category-based stereotypes predict emotional prejudices, which in turn predict behavior (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2007), so the proximate cause of intergroup behavior is emotions, not cognition (Dovidio, Brigham, Johnson, & Gaertner, 1996; Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005; Talaska, Fiske, & Chaiken, 2008). Thus, the cognitive beliefs have a catalyzing role in this process, and such stereotypes are more automatic than ordinary people think. Nevertheless, cognitive stereotypes are less automatic than stereotyping researchers originally thought, being over-ridden by motivation and information. A variety of goals override relatively automatic stereotypes: explicitly intending to respond non-stereotypically, training to “just say no,” perspective-taking, being reminded of a better self, and accuracy goals (see Fiske & Taylor, 2013, Ch. 6, for a review). But this is not a simple proposition. For example, active suppression fails because it creates a rebound. What’s more, people must have both motivation and capacity, as well as information, to override relatively automatic stereotypes. The 20 century taught social cognitive psychologists much about the processes of stereotyping. Cutting-Edge Research Into this mix have come two emerging trends, both involving adjacent disciplines—other social sciences, on the one hand, and neuroscience, on the other. As an illustrative case, we review the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) as well as its predictions for intergroup affect and behavior, which draws heavily on social science Cognition & Stereotyping 7 perspectives. We then close with an examination of how neuroscience can provide promising insight into thus area of research. Renewed Interest in Stereotype Content As noted, early social stereotyping research described racial and ethnic stereotypes. Gradually this research focused on the cognitive process of stereotyping, developing under the presumption that stereotyping processes generalize across groups, and in many respects, they apparently do. But the accumulated focus on process has ignored the nuances of stereotype content that target various outgroups. Content matters, not only process, because the content of stereotypes produces unique combinations of prejudiced emotions and discriminatory behavior. As group categories become more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous in the 21 century (Bodenhausen & Peery, 2009), models must describe the systematic patterns that cut across groups’ particular histories, positions, combinations, and patterns. Here, we briefly offer the Stereotype Content Model as one unifying framework that addresses stereotype nuances, their social adaptive functions, and possible neural signatures. Starting in the late 1990s, researchers began to suggest that stereotypical views may not be as uniformly unfavorable toward outgroups and flattering toward ingroups as generally assumed. For example, systematically different negative attitudes toward outgroups merged from experimentally manipulating intergroup contexts (see Fiske et al., 2007, for references). Intergroup image theory suggests that responses toward outgroup members differ based on power, status, and competition. Outgroup images depend on how those outgroups can influence the ingroup’s social standing. Cognition & Stereotyping 8 Recently, not only from a socially functional perspective, but also an evolutionarily functional on