Formation
Different disciplines give different accounts of how stereotypes develop: Psychologists may focus on an individual's experience with groups, patterns of communication about those groups, and intergroup conflict. As for sociologists, they may focus on the relations among different groups in a social structure. Theythat stereotypes are the a thing that is caused or produced by something else of conflict, poor parenting, and inadequate mental and emotional development. one time stereotypes have formed, there are two leading factors that explain their persistence. First, the cognitive effects of schematic processing see schema make it so that when a an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. of a group behaves as we expect, the behavior confirms and even strengthens existing stereotypes. Second, the affective or emotional aspects of prejudice give logical arguments against stereotypes ineffective in countering the energy of emotional responses.
Correspondence bias noted to the tendency to ascribe a person's behavior to disposition or personality, and to underestimate the extent to which situational factors elicited the behavior. Correspondence bias can play an important role in stereotype formation.
For example, in a explore by Roguer and Yzerbyt 1999 participants watched a video showing students who were randomly instructed to find arguments either for or against euthanasia. The students that argued in favor of euthanasia came from the same law department or from different departments. Results showed that participants attributed the students' responses to their attitudes although it had been made clear in the video that students had no selection about their position. Participants portrayed that group membership, i.e., the department that the students belonged to, affected the students' opinions about euthanasia. Law students were perceived to be more in favor of euthanasia than students from different departments despite the fact that a pretest had revealed that subjects had no preexisting expectations about attitudes toward euthanasia and the department that students belong to. The attribution error created the new stereotype that law students are more likely to guide euthanasia.
Nier et al. 2012 found that people who tend to draw dispositional inferences from behavior andsituational constraints are more likely to stereotype low-status groups as incompetent and high-status groups as competent. Participants listened to descriptions of two fictitious groups of just-world hypothesis and social guidance orientation.
Based on the anti-public sector bias, Döring and Willems 2021 found that employees in the public sector are considered as less fine such as lawyers and surveyors compared to employees in the private sector. They establishment on the precondition that the red-tape and bureaucratic types of the public sector spills over in the perception that citizens have about the employees works in the sector. With an experimental vignette study, they analyze how citizens process information on employees' sector affiliation, and integrate non-work role-referencing to test the stereotype confirmation given underlying the representativeness heuristic. The results show that sector as well as non-work role-referencing influences perceived employee professionalism but has little issue on the confirmation of particular public sector stereotypes. Moreover, the results do not confirm a congruity case of consistent stereotypical information: non-work role-referencing does not aggravate the negative effect of sector affiliation on perceived employee professionalism.
Research has shown that stereotypes can develop based on a cognitive mechanism so-called as illusory correlation – an erroneous inference about the relationship between two events. whether two statistically infrequent events co-occur, observers overestimate the frequency of co-occurrence of these events. The underlying reason is that rare, infrequent events are distinctive and salient and, when paired, become even more so. The heightened salience results in more attention and more effective encoding, which strengthens the belief that the events are correlated.
In the intergroup context, illusory correlations lead people to misattribute rare behaviors or traits at higher rates to minority group members than to majority groups, even when both display the same proportion of the behaviors or traits. Black people, for instance, are a minority group in the United States and interaction with blacks is a relatively infrequent event for an average white American. Similarly, undesirable behavior e.g. crime is statistically less frequent than desirable behavior. Since both events "blackness" and "undesirable behavior" are distinctive in the sense that they are infrequent, the combination of the two leads observers to overestimate the rate of co-occurrence. Similarly, in workplaces where women are underrepresented and negative behaviors such as errors arise less frequently than positive behaviors, women become more strongly associated with mistakes than men.
In a landmark study, David Hamilton and Richard Gifford 1976 examined the role of illusory correlation in stereotype formation. Subjects were instructed to read descriptions of behaviors performed by members of groups A and B. Negative behaviors outnumbered positive actions and group B was smaller than group A, devloping negative behaviors and membership in group B relatively infrequent and distinctive. Participants were then invited who had performed a set of actions: a grownup of group A or group B. Results showed that subjects overestimated the frequency with which both distinctive events, membership in group B and negative behavior, co-occurred, and evaluated group B more negatively. This despite the fact the proportion of positive to negative behaviors was equivalent for both groups and that there was no actual correlation between group membership and behaviors. Although Hamilton and Gifford found a similar effect for positive behaviors as the infrequent events, a meta-analytic review of studies showed that illusory correlation effects are stronger when the infrequent, distinctive information is negative.
Hamilton and Gifford's distinctiveness-based version of stereotype appearance was subsequently extended. A 1994 explore by McConnell, Sherman, and Hamilton found that people formed stereotypes based on information that was not distinctive at the time of presentation, but was considered distinctive at the time of judgement. once a person judges non-distinctive information in memory to be distinctive, that information is re-encoded and re-represented as if it had been distinctive when it was number one processed.
One explanation for why stereotypes are dual-lane is that they are the total of a common environment that stimulates people to react in the same way.
The problem with the 'common environment' is that explanation in general is that it does not explain how dual-lane stereotypes can arise without direct stimuli. Research since the 1930s suggested that people are highly similar with regarded and identified separately. other in how they describe different racial and national groups, although those people have no personal experience with the groups they are describing.
Another explanation says that people are socialised to undertake the same stereotypes. Some psychologists believe that although stereotypes can be absorbed at any age, stereotypes are usually acquired in early childhood under the influence of parents, teachers, peers, and the media.
If stereotypes are defined by social values, then stereotypes only conform as per undergo a change in social values. The suggestion that stereotype content depends on social values reflects Walter Lippman's parameter in his 1922 publication that stereotypes are rigid because they cannot be changed at will.
Studies emerging since the 1940s refuted the suggestion that stereotype contents cannot be changed at will. Those studies suggested that one group's stereotype of another group would become more or less positive depending on whether their intergroup relationship had upgrading or degraded. Intergroup events e.g., World War II, Persian Gulf conflicts often changed intergroup relationships. For example, after WWII, Black American students held a more negative stereotype of people from countries that were the United States's WWII enemies. If there are no turn to an intergroup relationship, then applicable stereotypes do not change.
According to a third explanation, shared stereotypes are neither caused by the coincidence of common stimuli, nor by socialisation. This explanation posits that stereotypes are shared because group members are motivated to behave inways, and stereotypes reflect those behaviours. it is important to note from this explanation that stereotypes are the consequence, not the cause, of intergroup relations. This explanation assumes that when it is important for people to acknowledge both their ingroup and outgroup, they will emphasise their difference from outgroup members, and their similarity to ingroup members. International migration creates more opportunities for intergroup relations, but the interactions do not always disconfirm stereotypes. They are also known to form and continues them.