Because other people are the source of most of our rewards and punishments, it isn’t surprising that we spend a lot of our time trying to understand them. Social cognition is the processes by which people come to understand others. We are constantly making inferences about what other people think, feel, and want (“Ethan is angry because he thinks Abby really likes Jacob”), and about what kinds of people they are deep down inside (“Ethan is such a possessive person”). We base these inferences on two kinds of information: the social categories to which people belong, and the specific things that people say and do.

You’ll recall from the Language and Thought chapter that categorization is the process by which people identify a stimulus as a member of a class of related stimuli. Once we have identified a novel stimulus as a member of a category (“That’s a textbook”), we can then use our knowledge of the category to make educated guesses about the properties of the novel stimulus (“It’s probably expensive”) and act accordingly (“I think I’ll download it illegally”).

What we do with textbooks we also do with people. No, not the illegal downloading part. The educated guessing part. Stereotyping is the process by which people draw inferences about people based on their knowledge of the categories to which those people belong. The moment we categorize a person as an adult, a male, a baseball player, and a Russian, we can use our knowledge of those categories to make some educated guesses about him—for example, that he shaves his face but not his legs, that he understands the infield fly rule, and that he knows more about Moscow than we do. When we offer children candy instead of cigarettes or ask gas station attendants for directions instead of financial advice, we are making inferences about people based solely on their category membership. As these examples suggest, stereotyping can be useful (Allport, 1954). So why does the word have such a distasteful connotation? Because stereotyping is a useful process that often produces harmful results, and it does so because stereotypes have four properties: They can be (1) inaccurate, (2) overused, (3) self-perpetuating, and (4) unconscious and automatic.

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1. Stereotypes Can Be Inaccurate

We draw inferences about individuals based on their groups, but some of the things we believe about those groups simply aren’t true. For instance, there is no evidence to indicate that Jews are especially greedy or that African Americans are especially lazy. Nonetheless, many American college students hold those beliefs, and have done so for most of the last century (Gilbert, 1951; Karlins, Coffman, & Walters, 1969; Katz & Braly, 1933). We aren’t born with beliefs like these, so how do we acquire them? We pay attention to what people say—in our homes and neighborhoods, on our televisions and computer screens. Many of the folks who believe that Jews are greedy or African Americans are lazy have never actually met a member of either group, and their mistaken beliefs are a result of listening too closely to what others tell them. In the process of inheriting the wisdom of our culture, it is inevitable that we also will inherit its ignorance.

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2. Stereotypes Can Be Overused

Because all thumbtacks are pretty much alike, our stereotypes about thumbtacks (small, cheap, painful when chewed) are quite useful. We will rarely be mistaken if we generalize from one thumbtack to another. But human categories are so variable that our stereotypes may offer only vague clues about the individuals who populate those categories. You probably believe that men have greater upper body strength than women do, and that belief is correct—on average. But the upper body strength of individuals within each of these categories is so varied that you cannot easily predict how much weight a particular person can lift simply by knowing that person’s gender. The inherent variability of human categories makes stereotypes less useful than they seem.

Alas, we don’t always recognize this because the mere act of categorizing a stimulus tends to warp our perceptions of that category’s variability. For instance, participants in some studies were shown a series of lines of different lengths (see FIGURE 12.12; McGarty & Turner, 1992; Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963). For one group of participants, the longest lines were labeled Group A, and the shortest lines were labeled Group B, as they are on the right side of FIGURE 12.12. For the second group of participants, the lines were shown without these category labels, as they are on the left side of FIGURE 12.12. When later asked to draw the lines from memory, those participants who had seen the category labels overestimated the similarity of the lines that shared a label and underestimated the similarity of lines that did not. What’s true of lines is true of people as well. The mere act of categorizing people as Blacks or Whites, Jews or Gentiles, artists or accountants can cause us to underestimate the variability within those categories (“All artists are flaky”) and to overestimate the variability between them (“Artists are much flakier than accountants”). When we underestimate the variability within a human category, we overestimate how useful our stereotypes about it will be (Park & Hastie, 1987; Rubin & Badea, 2012).

3. Stereotypes Can Be Self-Perpetuating

When we meet a truck driver who likes ballet more than football or a senior citizen who likes Eminem more than Bach, why don’t we simply abandon our stereotypes of these groups? The answer is that stereotypes perpetuate themselves, and they do this in two ways.

First, stereotypes can bias our perceptions, leading us to believe that those stereotypes have been confirmed when actually they have not (Fiske, 1998). In one study, participants listened to a radio broadcast of a college basketball game and were asked to evaluate the performance of one of the players. Although all participants heard the same prerecorded game, some were led to believe that the player was African American, and others were led to believe that the player was White. Participants’ stereotypes led them to expect different performances from Black and White athletes—and the participants perceived just what they expected: Those who believed the player was African American thought he had demonstrated greater athletic ability but less intelligence than did those who thought he was White (Stone, Perry, & Darley, 1997). Perceptual confirmation is the tendency for people to see what they expect to see, and this tendency helps perpetuate stereotypes.

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Second, our stereotypes can cause other people to behave in ways that actually do confirm the stereotypes we hold about them. In one study (Steele & Aronson, 1995), African American and White students took a test, and half the students in each group were asked to list their race at the top of the exam. When students were not asked to list their races, they performed at their academic level, but when students were asked to list their races, African American students became anxious about confirming a negative stereotype of their group, and this anxiety led them to perform below their academic level (see FIGURE 12.13). Self-fulfilling prophecy is the tendency for people to behave as they are expected to behave, and it is one of the ways in which stereotypes perpetuate themselves. What’s so troubling about this is that anyone who expected African-American students to perform poorly in this study would actually have seen evidence confirming their stereotype!

4. Stereotyping Can Be Unconscious and Automatic

If we recognize that stereotypes are inaccurate, overused, and self-perpetuating, then why don’t we just stop using them? The answer is that stereotyping happens unconsciously (which means that we don’t always know we are doing it) and automatically (which means that we often cannot avoid doing it even when we try; Banaji & Heiphetz, 2010; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Greenwald & Nosek, 2001).

For example, in one study, participants played a video game in which photos of Black or White men holding either guns or cameras were briefly flashed on the screen. Participants earned money by shooting men with guns and lost money by shooting men with cameras. All participants made mistakes, but they tended to make two in particular, namely, they mistakenly shot Black men holding cameras and mistakenly failed to shoot White men holding guns (Correll et al., 2002). Although the photos appeared on the screen so quickly that participants did not have enough time to consciously consider their stereotypes, those stereotypes worked unconsciously, causing them to mistake a camera for a gun when it was in the hands of a Black man and a gun for a camera when it was in the hands of a White man. What’s more, Black participants were just as likely to make this pattern of errors as were White participants!

Stereotyping is often unconscious and automatic, but that doesn’t mean it is inevitable (Blair, 2002; Kawakami et al., 2000; Milne & Grafman, 2001; Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001). For instance, in one study, police officers received special training before playing the gun-and-camera video game (Correll et al., 2007). The results showed that just like ordinary people, the officers took a few milliseconds longer to decide not to shoot a Black man than a White man, indicating that their stereotypes were unconsciously and automatically influencing their thinking. But unlike ordinary people, the officers didn’t actually shoot Black men more often than White men, indicating that they had learned how to keep those stereotypes from influencing their behavior. Other studies show that simple games and exercises can reduce the automatic influence of stereotypes among civilians too (Phills et al., 2011; Todd et al., 2011).

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in which he described his vision for America: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Research on stereotyping demonstrates that Dr. King’s concerns are still justified. We do indeed judge others by the color of their skin—as well as by their gender, nationality, religion, age, and occupation—and in so doing, we sometimes make mistakes. But are we any better at judging people by the content of their character? If we could somehow turn off our stereotypes and treat each person as an individual, would we judge these individuals accurately?

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Probably not. Treating a person as an individual means judging that person by his or her own words and deeds, and this turns out to be a lot more difficult than it sounds because the relationship between what a person is and what a person says or does is neither simple nor straightforward. An honest person may lie to save a friend from embarrassment, and a dishonest person may tell the truth to bolster her credibility. Happy people have weepy moments, polite people can be rude in traffic, and those who despise us can be flattering when they need a favor. In short, people’s behavior sometimes tells us about the kinds of people they are—about their characters, their traits, and their dispositions—but sometimes it simply tells us about the kinds of situations they happen to be in. Whenever we see a behavior, we must decide which of these two things—dispositions or situations—it is telling us about. How do we do that?

An attribution is an inference about the cause of a person’s behavior (Epley & Waytz, 2010; Gilbert, 1998). We make situational attributions when we decide that a person’s behavior was caused by some temporary aspect of the situation in which it occurred (“Sarah’s crying because she just got some bad news”), and we make dispositional attributions when we decide that a person’s behavior was caused by a relatively enduring tendency to think, feel, or act in a particular way (“Sarah’s crying because she’s just such a baby”). Research shows that this decision is quite difficult and that people often make the wrong one. Specifically, people are prone to correspondence bias which is the tendency to make dispositional attributions instead of situational attributions (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones & Harris, 1967; Ross, 1977).

For example, volunteers in one experiment played a trivia game in which one participant acted as the quizmaster and made up a list of unusual questions, another participant acted as the contestant and tried to answer those questions, and a third participant acted as the observer and simply watched the game. The quizmasters tended to ask tricky questions based on their own idiosyncratic knowledge, and contestants were generally unable to answer them. After watching the game, the observers were asked to decide how knowledgeable the quizmaster and the contestant were. Although the quizmasters had asked good questions and the contestants had given bad answers, it should have been clear to the observers that all this asking and answering was a product of the roles each person had been assigned to play and that the contestant would have asked equally good questions and the quizmaster would have given equally bad answers had their roles been reversed. And yet observers tended to rate the quizmaster as more knowledgeable than the contestant (Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977) and were more likely to choose the quizmaster as their own partner in an upcoming game (Quattrone, 1982). Even when we know that a successful athlete had a home field advantage or that a successful entrepreneur had family connections, we tend to attribute the individual’s success to talent and tenacity. Research shows that this happens because information about situations is often hard to get and hard to use (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). As a result, we tend to believe that other peoples’ actions are caused by their dispositions even when there is a perfectly reasonable situational explanation.

The correspondence bias is stronger under some circumstances than others. For example, we seem to be more prone to correspondence bias when judging other people’s behavior than when judging our own. The actor-observer effect is the tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviors while making dispositional attributions for the identical behavior of others (Jones & Nisbett, 1972). When college students are asked to explain why they and their friends chose their majors, they tend to explain their own choices in terms of situations (“I chose economics because my parents told me I have to support myself as soon as I’m done with college”) and their friends’ choices in terms of dispositions (“Leah chose economics because she’s materialistic”) (Nisbett et al., 1973). The actor–observer effect occurs because people typically have more information about the situations that caused their own behavior than about the situations that caused other people’s behavior. We can remember getting the please-major-in-something-practical lecture from our parents, but we weren’t at Leah’s house to see her get the same lecture. Indeed, when people are shown videotapes of their conversations that allow them to see themselves from their partner’s point of view, they tend to make dispositional attributions for their own behavior and situational attributions for their partner’s (Storms, 1973; Taylor & Fiske, 1975).

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