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. They suggest that stereotypes are the result of conflict, poor
parenting, and inadequate mental and emotional development. Once stereotypes have formed,
there are two main factors that explain their persistence. First, the cognitive effects of schematic
processing (see schema) make it so that when a member of a group behaves as we expect, the
behavior confirms and even strengthens existing stereotypes. Second, the affective or emotional
aspects of prejudice render logical arguments against stereotypes ineffective in countering the
power of emotional responses.[24]

Correspondence bias
Main article: Correspondence bias

Correspondence bias refers 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.[25]

For example, in a study 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 choice about their position.
Participants reported 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 support euthanasia.[26]

Nier et al. (2012) found that people who tend to draw dispositional inferences from behavior and
ignore situational 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
Pacific Islanders, one of which was described as being higher in status than the other. In a second
study, subjects rated actual groups the poor and wealthy, women and men in the United States
in terms of their competence. Subjects who scored high on the measure of correspondence bias
stereotyped the poor, women, and the fictitious lower-status Pacific Islanders as incompetent
whereas they stereotyped the wealthy, men, and the high-status Pacific Islanders as competent.
The correspondence bias was a significant predictor of stereotyping even after controlling for
other measures that have been linked to beliefs about low status groups, the just-world
hypothesis and social dominance orientation.[27]
Illusory correlation
Main article: Illusory correlation

Research has shown that stereotypes can develop based on a cognitive mechanism known as
illusory correlation an erroneous inference about the relationship between two events.[1][28][29] If
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.
[30][31][32]

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.[30] Similarly, in workplaces where women are underrepresented and negative
behaviors such as errors occur less frequently than positive behaviors, women become more
strongly associated with mistakes than men.[33]

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, making negative behaviors and membership in group B
relatively infrequent and distinctive. Participants were then asked who had performed a set of
actions: a person 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.[30] 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.[28]

Hamilton and Gifford's distinctiveness-based explanation of stereotype formation was

subsequently extended.[31] A 1994 study 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.[34] 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 first processed.[34]
Common environment

One explanation for why stereotypes are shared is that they are the result of a common
environment that stimulates people to react in the same way.[1]

The problem with the common environment explanation in general is that it does not explain
how shared stereotypes can occur without direct stimuli.[1] Research since the 1930s suggested
that people are highly similar with each other in how they describe different racial and national
groups, although those people have no personal experience with the groups they are describing.
[35]

Socialization and upbringing

Another explanation says that people are socialised to adopt the same stereotypes.[1] 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 change as per changes in social
values.[1] The suggestion that stereotype content depend on social values reflects Walter
Lippman's argument in his 1922 publication that stereotypes are rigid because they cannot be
changed at will.[10]

Studies emerging since the 1940s refuted the suggestion that stereotype contents cannot be
changed at will. Those studies suggested that one groups stereotype of another group would
become more or less positive depending on whether their intergroup relationship had improved
or degraded.[10][36][37] Intergroup events (e.g., World War Two, Persian Gulf conflict) often
changed intergroup relationships. For example, after WWII, Black American students held a
more negative stereotype of people from countries that were the United Statess WWII enemies.
[10]
If there are no changes to an intergroup relationship, then relevant stereotypes do not change.
[11]

Intergroup relations

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 in certain ways, and stereotypes reflect those
behaviours.[1] 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.[1]

Activation
The dual-process model of cognitive processing of stereotypes asserts that automatic activation
of stereotypes is followed by a controlled processing stage, during which an individual may
choose to disregard or ignore the stereotyped information that has been brought to mind.[12]

A number of studies have found that stereotypes are activated automatically. Patricia Devine
(1989), for example, suggested that stereotypes are automatically activated in the presence of a
member (or some symbolic equivalent) of a stereotyped group and that the unintentional
activation of the stereotype is equally strong for high- and low-prejudice persons. Words related
to the cultural stereotype of blacks were presented subliminally. During an ostensibly unrelated
impression-formation task, subjects read a paragraph describing a race-unspecified target
person's behaviors and rated the target person on several trait scales. Results showed that
participants who received a high proportion of racial words rated the target person in the story as
significantly more hostile than participants who were presented with a lower proportion of words
related to the stereotype. This effect held true for both high- and low-prejudice subjects (as
measured by the Modern Racism Scale). Thus, the racial stereotype was activated even for low-
prejudice individuals who did not personally endorse it.[12][38][39] Studies using alternative priming
methods have shown that the activation of gender and age stereotypes can also be automatic.[40][41]

Subsequent research suggested that the relation between category activation and stereotype
activation was more complex.[39][42] Lepore and Brown (1997), for instance, noted that the words
used in Devine's study were both neutral category labels (e.g., "Blacks") and stereotypic
attributes (e.g., "lazy"). They argued that if only the neutral category labels were presented,
people high and low in prejudice would respond differently. In a design similar to Devine's,
Lepore and Brown primed the category of African-Americans using labels such as "blacks" and
"West Indians" and then assessed the differential activation of the associated stereotype in the
subsequent impression-formation task. They found that high-prejudice participants increased
their ratings of the target person on the negative stereotypic dimensions and decreased them on
the positive dimension whereas low-prejudice subjects tended in the opposite direction. The
results suggest that the level of prejudice and stereotype endorsement affects people's judgements
when the category and not the stereotype per se is primed.[43]

Research has shown that people can be trained to activate counterstereotypic information and
thereby reduce the automatic activation of negative stereotypes. In a study by Kawakami et al.
(2000), for example, participants were presented with a category label and taught to respond
"No" to stereotypic traits and "Yes" to nonstereotypic traits. After this training period, subjects
showed reduced stereotype activation.[44][45] This effect is based on the learning of new and more
positive stereotypes rather than the negation of already existing ones.[45]

Automatic behavioral outcomes

Empirical evidence suggests that stereotype activation can automatically influence social
behavior.[46][47][48][49] For example, Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) activated the stereotype of
the elderly among half of their participants by administering a scrambled-sentence test where
participants saw words related to age stereotypes. Subjects primed with the stereotype walked
significantly more slowly than the control group (although the test did not include any words
specifically referring to slowness), thus acting in a way that the stereotype suggests that elderly
people will act. In another experiment, Bargh, Chen, and Burrows also found that because the
stereotype about blacks includes the notion of aggression, subliminal exposure to black faces
increased the likelihood that randomly selected white college students reacted with more
aggression and hostility than participants who subconsciously viewed a white face.[50] Similarly,
Correll et al. (2002) showed that activated stereotypes about blacks can influence people's
behavior. In a series of experiments, black and white participants played a video game, in which
a black or white person was shown holding a gun or a harmless object (e.g., a mobile phone).
Participants had to decide as quickly as possible whether to shoot the target. When the target
person was armed, both black and white participants were faster in deciding to shoot the target
when he was black than when he was white. When the target was unarmed, the participants
avoided shooting him more quickly when he was white. Time pressure made the shooter bias
even more pronounced.[51]

Accuracy

A magazine feature from Beauty Parade from March 1952 stereotyping women drivers. It features Bettie
Page as the model.

Stereotypes can be efficient shortcuts and sense-making tools. They can, however, keep people
from processing new or unexpected information about each individual, thus biasing the
impression formation process.[1] Early researchers believed that stereotypes were inaccurate
representations of reality.[35] A series of pioneering studies in the 1930s found no empirical
support for widely held racial stereotypes.[10] By the mid-1950s, Gordon Allport wrote that, "It is
possible for a stereotype to grow in defiance of all evidence."[22]

Research on the role of illusory correlations in the formation of stereotypes suggests that
stereotypes can develop because of incorrect inferences about the relationship between two
events (e.g., membership in a social group and bad or good attributes). This means that at least
some stereotypes are inaccurate.[28][30][32][34]

Empirical social science research shows that stereotypes are often accurate.[52] Jussim et al.
reviewed four studies concerning racial and seven studies that examined gender stereotypes
about demographic characteristics, academic achievement, personality and behavior. Based on
that, the authors argued that some aspects of ethnic and gender stereotypes are accurate while
stereotypes concerning political affiliation and nationality are much less accurate.[53] A study by
Terracciano et al. also found that stereotypic beliefs about nationality do not reflect the actual
personality traits of people from different cultures.[54]

Effects
Attributional ambiguity
Main article: Attributional ambiguity

Attributive ambiguity refers to the uncertainty that members of stereotyped groups experience in
interpreting the causes of others' behavior toward them. Stereotyped individuals who receive
negative feedback can attribute it either to personal shortcomings, such as lack of ability or poor
effort, or the evaluator's stereotypes and prejudice toward their social group. Alternatively,
positive feedback can either be attributed to personal merit or discounted as a form of sympathy
or pity.[55][56][57]

Crocker et al. (1991) showed that when black participants were evaluated by a white person who
was aware of their race, black subjects mistrusted the feedback, attributing negative feedback to
the evaluator's stereotypes and positive feedback to the evaluator's desire to appear unbiased.
When the black participants' race was unknown to the evaluator, they were more accepting of the
feedback.[58]

Attributional ambiguity has been shown to affect a person's self-esteem. When they receive
positive evaluations, stereotyped individuals are uncertain of whether they really deserved their
success and, consequently, they find it difficult to take credit for their achievements. In the case
of negative feedback, ambiguity has been shown to have a protective effect on self-esteem as it
allows people to assign blame to external causes. Some studies, however, have found that this
effect only holds when stereotyped individuals can be absolutely certain that their negative
outcomes are due to the evaluators's prejudice. If any room for uncertainty remains, stereotyped
individuals tend to blame themselves.[56]

Attributional ambiguity can also make it difficult to assess one's skills because performance-
related evaluations are mistrusted or discounted. Moreover, it can lead to the belief that one's
efforts are not directly linked to the outcomes, thereby depressing one's motivation to succeed.[55]

Stereotype threat
The effect of stereotype threat (ST) on math test scores for girls and boys. Data from Osborne (2007). [59]

Main article: Stereotype threat

Stereotype threat occurs when people are aware of a negative stereotype about their social group
and experience anxiety or concern that they might confirm the stereotype.[60] Stereotype threat
has been shown to undermine performance in a variety of domains.[61][62]

Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson conducted the first experiments showing that stereotype
threat can depress intellectual performance on standardized tests. In one study, they found that
black college students performed worse than white students on a verbal test when the task was
framed as a measure of intelligence. When it was not presented in that manner, the performance
gap narrowed. Subsequent experiments showed that framing the test as diagnostic of intellectual
ability made black students more aware of negative stereotypes about their group, which in turn
impaired their performance.[63] Stereotype threat effects have been demonstrated for an array of
social groups in many different arenas, including not only academics but also sports,[64] chess[65]
and business.[66]

Not only has stereotype threat been widely criticized by on a theoretical basis,[67][68] but has failed
several attempts to replicate it's experimental evidence.[68][69][70][71] The findings in support of the
concept have been suggested by multiple methodological reviews to be the product of
publication bias.[71][72]

Self-fulfilling prophecy
Main article: Self-fulfilling prophecy

Stereotypes lead people to expect certain actions from members of social groups. These
stereotype-based expectations may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, in which one's inaccurate
expectations about a person's behavior, through social interaction, prompt that person to act in
stereotype-consistent ways, thus confirming one's erroneous expectations and validating the
stereotype.[73][74][75]

Word, Zanna, and Cooper (1974) demonstrated the effects of stereotypes in the context of a job
interview. White participants interviewed black and white subjects who, prior to the experiments,
had been trained to act in a standardized manner. Analysis of the videotaped interviews showed
that black job applicants were treated differently: They received shorter amounts of interview
time and less eye contact; interviewers made more speech errors (e.g., stutters, sentence
incompletions, incoherent sounds) and physically distanced themselves from black applicants. In
a second experiment, trained interviewers were instructed to treat applicants, all of whom were
white, like the whites or blacks had been treated in the first experiment. As a result, applicants
treated like the blacks of the first experiment behaved in a more nervous manner and received
more negative performance ratings than interviewees receiving the treatment previously afforded
to whites.[76]

A 1977 study by Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid found a similar pattern in social interactions
between men and women. Male undergraduate students were asked to talk to female
undergraduates, whom they believed to be physically attractive or unattractive, on the phone.
The conversations were taped and analysis showed that men who thought that they were talking
to an attractive woman communicated in a more positive and friendlier manner than men who
believed that they were talking to unattractive women. This altered the women's behavior:
Female subjects who, unknowingly to them, were perceived to be physically attractive behaved
in a friendly, likeable, and sociable manner in comparison with subjects who were regarded as
unattractive.[77]

Discrimination

Because stereotypes simplify and justify social reality, they have potentially powerful effects on
how people perceive and treat one another.[78] As a result, stereotypes can lead to discrimination
in labor markets and other domains.[79] For example, Tilcsik (2011) has found that employers
who seek job applicants with stereotypically male heterosexual traits are particularly likely to
engage in discrimination against gay men, suggesting that discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation is partly rooted in specific stereotypes and that these stereotypes loom large in many
labor markets.[14] Agerstrm and Rooth (2011) showed that automatic obesity stereotypes
captured by the Implicit Association Test can predict real hiring discrimination against the obese.
[80]
Similarly, experiments suggest that gender stereotypes play an important role in judgments
that affect hiring decisions.[81][82]

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype