Stereotypes and social judgment: the effects of typicality and group heterogeneity.
Two experiments showed that when subjects believed a group to be heterogenous, they based their liking for a particular group member on their liking for the group as a whole, independently of and in addition to the target's behavior, and regardless of the target's typicality. When they believed the group to be homogenous, however, they treated the target's typicality as a favorable or unfavorable attribute, which affected their evaluation. The latter subjects used their group stereotype as a standard of comparison in judging the implications of the target's behavior for a trait to which it was relevant. All subjects' stereotypes had a positive influence on judgments of stereotyped-related traits for which the target's behavior was uninformative. A conceptualization is proposed to account for these findings.
Lambert
A J
AJ
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign 61820.
Wyer
R S
RS
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007600:Judgment; D010551:Personality; D012925:Social Conformity; D012933:Social Identification; D012938:Social Perception; D013240:Stereotyping