It is probably true to say that every ethnic group has racial stereotypes of other groups. There is no evidence for this view, however, and many writers argue that it is merely a way of justifying racist attitudes and behaviors. Aim : To investigate the stereotypical attitudes of Americans towards different races.
Method : Questionnaire method was used to investigate stereotypes. American university students were given a list of nationalities and ethnic groups e. Irish, Germans etc.
They were asked to pick out five or six traits which they thought were typical of each group. Results : There was considerable agreement in the traits selected. White Americans, for example, were seen as industrious, progressive and ambitious. African Americans were seen as lazy, ignorant and musical. Participants were quite ready to rate ethnic groups with whom they had no personal contact. Conclusion : Ethnic stereotypes are widespread, and shared by members of a particular social group.
The Katz and Braly studies were done in the s and it can be argued that cultures have changed since then and we are much less likely to hold these stereotypes.
Later studies conducted in and found changes in the stereotypes and the extent to which they are held. In general, stereotypes in the later study tended to be more positive but the belief that particular ethnic groups held particular characteristics still existed.
Also, it should be noted that this study has relied entirely on verbal reports and is therefore extremely low in ecological validity.
Just because participants in a study will trot out stereotypes when asked does not mean to say that people go around acting on them. People do not necessarily behave as though the stereotypes are true. The limited information that the experiments are given is also likely to create demand characteristics i. Finally, there is the problem of social desirability with questionnaire research — people may lie.
Also the university might have rejected Ben either as it is prejudiced in its selection or, alternatively, has a fair-assessment system and Ben is rejected for reasons unrelated to his group membership. A key point to note here is that the predictive brain operates on the state of the world as it is experienced and not on the state of the world as we believe it should be. Working towards gender equality and encouraging more women into engineering is a key aim in many Western societies, but that admirable social and political goal should not lead us to misunderstand the unconscious working of the predictive brain.
A second important point is that the Bayesian brain seeks predictive validity through the picking up of regularities to form associations on the basis of experience. The predictive brain, as a perceptual mechanism, is directed solely by the minimization of surprisal.
It does not make a moral judgement or provide an explanation for the state of the world. It simply seeks to make accurate predictions. In a study on language learning, Perfors and Navarro argued that the Bayesian brain learns through a process of iterative learning from other members of the community.
Whereas previous researchers have argued that it is solely the structure of language that structures the meanings acquired, Perfors and Navarro argued that the structure of the external world and the meanings within it will also influence the process.
Thus, semantic knowledge acquired will be shaped by the meaning structure communicated. As long as the things people talk about reflect the relationships of those things in the external world then the semantic relationships learnt will reflect the meanings present in the external world.
Thus, knowledge of the relationship between concepts will be acquired from the meanings communicated by others. Furthermore, the proposal of a Bayesian brain does not require that it operates in an optimal or rational manner—simply that a Bayesian model best represents its behaviour Tauber et al.
For the predictive brain, the degree to which implicit stereotypes are learnt and employed depends on the probabilities with which the implicit associations between the social category and an attribute are expected and experienced in communication.
It is this world of the social perceiver that is considered now. Implicit stereotypes, like other implicit associations can be viewed as cultural knowledge or folk wisdom that the person acquires through their experience in a culture Bruner, The idea that stereotypical associations are cultural in origin was proposed in the early work on stereotypes, but has tended to be ignored in the focus on the fallacy or bias of individual cognition.
Journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann is usually seen as stimulating the academic study of stereotyping with his book Public Opinion Hinton, To illustrate this, we can examine the origin of the associations identified in the Princeton studies, discussed at the beginning of this article, by considering the example of the English. As Hinton has argued, the selected attributes reflect the notion of the English gentleman, a common representation of the Englishman in the American media of the first half of the twentieth century, and hence familiar to the exclusively male, upper-class Princeton student participants who, if they had encountered English people it is likely that they would be from the same class demographic as themselves.
It is also likely that these participants did not consider nor were they asked to do so a range of categories of English people, such as women or the working classes, so, not surprisingly, tended to focus on the specific and familiar representation of the English defined for them by their culture to paraphrase Lippmann.
By , the image of the English gentleman had become rather archaic and even a figure of fun in both the British and American media Hinton, and the selected English attributes had changed.
Even so, some students refused to do the task in and Brown et al. To perform the task with no information except the category name, the students may have simply drawn on attributes they knew to be commonly circulating about the English in their culture.
Yet this does not mean that the students viewed all English people as sportsmanlike. However, the sportsmanlike English gentleman was a familiar trope in American popular culture at the time, typified by actor Ronald Colman in Hollywood movies such as The Dark Angel , , and Bulldog Drummond , A person with no personal antipathy to lawyers, and well-aware that they are a highly regulated profession of mostly honest people, might make the prediction that when a lawyer character appears in a popular crime drama that they will probably be crooked from the experience of lawyers in famous movies such as The Godfather series, —, and television programs such as Breaking Bad , —, along with the spin-off series about a crooked lawyer, Better Call Saul , As Devine has argued, well-learnt associations picked up during socialization form implicit stereotypes even for the individual seeking non-prejudiced views.
It is argued here that the predictive brain model provides the mechanism for this. Yet culture is neither monolithic nor fixed and unchanging. People are active in the construction both of their social world and their media environment Livingstone, ; Burr, People have links of acquaintanceship, friendship, etc. Within any society, there will be different social networks of this kind communicating different social representations about social groups.
According to Moscovici , it is these shared representations that define a culture or subcultural group. Different cultural groups will differ ideologically through their position in society and the representations that circulate in the communication within their social network.
In the communication within any social network there will be regular and consistent associations between social groups and attributes, which will be picked up by it members, through the working of the predictive brain. The extent to which individuals share implicit associations will depend on the hegemonic social representations within the society across cultural groups Gillespie, , such as a positive belief in democracy and a negative view of communism, which are prevalent in the wider social institutions within a nation, and examined in the sociological study of stereotypes for example, Pickering, The role of stereotypes in communication within a social network was demonstrated by Kashima and colleagues Kashima and Yeung, ; Kashima et al.
The results showed that stereotype-consistent information was emphasized. Even though stereotype-inconsistent information attracted attention it was not necessarily passed on. Thus, the story became more stereotypical and consistent in the serial retelling. Within a social network common understandings are developed via the use of stereotypes. Members of the culture assume a knowledge of the stereotype in other group members, which facilitates social interaction, but potentially also helps to maintain the stereotype, even in the face of inconsistent information.
The complex dynamics of the individual within a social network for example, Christakis and Fowler, needs to be considered in investigating the formation, transmission and maintenance of implicit stereotypes. In the modern world of the twenty-first century, the options available for people to construct their social environments have radically increased Giddens, The media has rapidly expanded through multiple television channels, a proliferation of media outlets, and the development of social media via the internet.
While this offers the potential for people to engage with a diversity of representation and counter-stereotypical information, it also allows people to remain in an ideological subculture, communicating with like-minded people where specific representations of cultural others are constantly being circulated unchallenged within the social network.
In terms of the predictive brain, implicit associations will develop from the consistent messages people receive in their everyday lives. If certain implicit stereotypes are deemed unacceptable then it will only be when people experience consistent counter-stereotypical information over a long period of time that these associations will be probabilistically undermined.
Over the last 30 years stereotype research has focused on implicit stereotypes, particularly using the IAT, which have been interpreted as revealing an implicit or unconscious cognitive bias, even for the consciously fair-minded person. Despite research questioning the predictive validity of the IAT as a method of revealing unconscious prejudice for example, Oswald et al.
According to the predictive brain model, when the culture changes then the implicit stereotypes of its members will change albeit slowly for some associations. Therefore, to properly understand the nature of implicit stereotypes, the cognitive research needs to be combined with the study of the dynamics of culture, to understand the specific associations prevalent in the communication within a culture and their implicit influence on the members of that culture.
Palgrave Communications. I worked with the following data. Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA. Google Scholar. Harper and Row: New York. Psychological Science ; 25 9 : — Bargh JA Unconscious thought theory and its discontents: A critique of the critiques. Social Cognition ; 29 6 : — Bargh JA The cognitive monster: The case against controllability of automatic stereotype effects. In: Chaiken S and Trope Y eds. Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology. Guilford: New York, pp — Current Directions in Psychological Science ; 15 1 : 1—4.
Brown R Social Psychology. Collier-Macmillan: London. Bruner JS Acts of Meaning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience ; 4 25 : 1— Social Justice Research ; 23 4 : — Clark A Perceiving as predicting. Perception and Its Modalities. Oxford University Press: New York, pp 23— Clark A Whatever next?
Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences ; 36 3 : — Psychological Review ; 82 6 : — Journal of Experimental Psychology: General ; 9 : — Devine PG Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology ; 48 6 : — Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. In: Nelson TD ed. Handbook of Prejudice, Sereotyping, and Discrimination. Taylor and Francis: New York, pp 61— Uncovering behavioral strategies.
Journal of the American Statistical Society ; 90 : — Fox R Prejudice and the unfinished mind: A new look at an old failing. Psychological Inquiry ; 3 2 : — Social Psychology Quarterly ; 46 1 : 23— A historical perspective on current neuroscience literature. Neuropsychologia ; 53 , — Polity Press: Cambridge, UK. Gigerenzer G and Gaissmaier W Heuristic decision making. Annual Review of Psychology ; 62 , — Gilbert GM Stereotype persistence and change among college students.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology ; 46 2 : — CAS Google Scholar. Gillespie A Social representations, alternative representations and semantic barriers. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour ; 38 4 : — Psychological Review ; 1 : 4— Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ; 4 : — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ; 74 6 : — Meta-analysis of predictive validity.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ; 97 1 : 17— Vintage Books: New York. Routledge: London. Psychology Press: Hove, UK. Oxford University Press: New York. Kahneman D Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin Books: London. Kahneman D and Tversky A On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review ; 80 4 : — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ; 13 1 : 1— Kashima Y, Lyons A and Clark A The maintenance of cultural stereotypes in the conversational retelling of narratives.
Asian Journal of Social Psychology ; 16 1 : 60— Acta Psychologica Sinica ; 42 1 : 56— Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology ; 30 2 : — Norton: New York. We see close up the individual differences among members of our own social groups, but those in other social groups blur together in the distance into a homogeneous whole, everyone a minor variation on the same basic theme. They tried adding new counter-stereotype information. They told people that over the years the members of the groups changed significantly.
They even told one group that they got the names mixed up, and that everything people thought they knew about the groups was completely backward. To no avail. The original views of the two groups persisted. The things we hear create stereotypes: What we learn from other people and the broader society.
We also pick up stereotypes from the world around us. We hear stereotypical talk, or see see stereotypical images. Family, friends, school, work, church, the media, etc. Of course, we can learn from people whether they say anything or not.
Immigration from Africa to Italy has been a controversial issue in recent years. Two-thirds of the children said they would prefer a White playmate to a Black playmate, and many of them described White people in more positive terms than they described Black people.
The parents answered straightforward, explicit questions e. The speed of our responses to pairs of words or concepts is a good measure of how strongly the two are connected in our minds. Of course, the same kind of stereotype transmission happens here. We are made such that we notice distinctive things—a single O in a field of Xs, a child in a group of adults, or a small number of women in a group comprised largely of men.
What happens when two distinctive things occur simultaneously? We exaggerate the frequency with which it happens.
0コメント