Conceptual and visual representations of racial categories: Distinguishing subtypes from subgroups
Introduction
Social psychologists have largely examined the processes that guide social perception and judgment as they relate to the activation of broad bases of social categorization like race, age, and gender. While these categories provide a great deal of explanatory power in describing the bases of person perception (Macrae, Quinn, Mason, & Quadflieg, 2005), explorations of these broad social categories alone may not provide a full understanding of the processes that guide stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Indeed, when forming an impression of a target, perceivers often use information beyond the superordinate category to increase judgment accuracy (Stangor, Lynch, Duan, & Glas, 1992). While much of the public discourse focused on addressing discrimination stays at the level of broad social categories, more nuanced perspectives may be needed to understand and address the variability in the experiences of individuals. Reflecting this recognition are research programs exploring intersectionality (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), phenotypicality bias (Maddox, 2004), and biracial perception (Pauker et al., 2009). With this investigation, we seek to elaborate on research exploring the nature of social category representations with a focus on race.
Section snippets
Superordinate vs. subordinate categories
After initially categorizing a target, a perceiver may be motivated to gather individuating information that will distinguish the target from other category members (Brewer, 1988, Fiske and Neuberg, 1990). This additional information about a category member may be incorporated into the perceiver's superordinate category representation, contributing to the formation of subcategories (Hewstone and Hamberger, 2000, Maurer et al., 1995, Queller and Smith, 2002). Examinations of natural categories
Overview: identifying subgroups and subtypes
Park, Wolsko, and Judd (2001) described three measures for establishing that subgrouping or subtyping has occurred: (1) confusion with other subgroup or subtype members, (2) degree of similarity between the target and other individuals in the group, and (3) degree of typicality of the target in relation to the superordinate category. Collectively, these three measures can estimate a target's identity as belonging to a subgroup or a subtype of a superordinate category. Here, by examining
Experiment 1: conceptual representations of racial subcategories
Experiment 1 was designed to replicate and extend earlier investigations of Black male subcategory representations (Devine and Baker, 1991, Green and Manzi, 2002, McCabe and Brannon, 2004) by examining stereotypic trait listings for several potential subcategories of Black men. Further extending that work, we also explored representations of White men and included a measure of perceived typicality for each subcategory.
Experiment 2: visual representations of racial subcategories
Park and colleagues (2001) argued that although typicality is a reliable indicator of subgrouping and subtyping, it is problematic in its invasiveness—asking participants to rate typicality draws their attention to disconfirming (or confirming) attributes of the target in relation to the superordinate category. Thus, the task itself may be prompting participants to subcategorize in a particular manner, rather than measuring their spontaneous mental processes. In Experiment 2 we sought
General discussion
This research examined the extent to which subcategories represent subgroups versus subtypes of naturally occurring social categories using both explicit and implicit measures of category typicality. Across two experiments and three independent measures of typicality we found evidence that representations of athlete and rapper subcategories represented subgroups of Black men, but subtypes of White men. Conversely, we found that representations of doctor and businessman subcategories represented
References (40)
- et al.
A Continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation
- et al.
Perceived variability and stereotype change
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
(2000) - et al.
Cognitive models of stereotype change. 3. Subtyping and the perceived typicality of disconfirming group members
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
(1992) - et al.
Measurement of subtyping in stereotype change
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
(2001) - et al.
Basic objects in natural categories
Cognitive Psychology
(1976) The nature of prejudice
(1954)- et al.
Contextual moderation of racial bias: The impact of social roles on controlled and automatically activated attitudes
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(2004) A dual process model of impression formation
- et al.
Perceptions of the elderly: Stereotypes as prototypes
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(1981) - et al.
Measurement of racial stereotype subtyping
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
(1991)
Reverse correlating social face perception
Social Psychological and Personality Science
Ethnic out-group faces are biased in the prejudiced mind
Psychological Science
rcicr: Reverse correlation image classification toolbox. R package version 0.3.2.
Looking the part: Social status cues shape race perception
PloS One
Sounding Black or White: Priming identity and biracial speech
Frontiers in Psychology
Mini meta-analysis of your own studies: Some arguments on why and a primer on how
Social and Personality Psychology Compass
A comparison of methodologies for uncovering the structure of racial stereotype subgrouping
Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal
Revision and change of stereotypic beliefs: In search of the elusive subtyping model
European Review of Social Psychology
FaceGen Modeller
Cognitive models of stereotype change: (4) Motivational and cognitive influences
European Journal of Social Psychology
Cited by (18)
The mind's “aye”? Investigating overlap in findings produced by reverse correlation versus self-report
2023, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyGender essentialism and the mental representation of transgender women and men: A multimethod investigation of stereotype content
2021, CognitionCitation Excerpt :First, we gather gender group stereotypes using the reverse correlation task (Dotsch & Todorov, 2012) to see a participant's implicit mental image of the group. This technique has been used to study mental images of a variety of groups, including ones defined by race (Hinzman & Maddox, 2017), socioeconomic status (Brown-Iannuzzi, Dotsch, Cooley, & Payne, 2017), and emotional expression (Jack, Caldara, & Schyns, 2012). This method of capturing stereotype content complements Studies 1a, 1b, and 2, as it is both more implicit and more visual than our prior measures.
Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces
2021, CognitionCitation Excerpt :Although such arbitrarily determined groups are psychologically meaningful (see Dunham, 2018, for a comprehensive review), different effects might have emerged had we used more established, familiar groups (e.g., political groups, racial/ethnic groups) for which stored visual representations are presumably available for retrieval. Insofar as people have multiple visual representations of the same social group in memory (Hinzman & Maddox, 2017), engaging in perspective taking might change which of several representations is retrieved. Future research could address this issue by testing whether perspective taking has comparable effects on the generation of visual representations of familiar and unfamiliar groups.
Racial stereotyping of gay men: Can a minority sexual orientation erase race?
2019, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :If the observed de-racialization effects really stem from perceivers' assumption that racial group prototypes are heterosexual by default (e.g., Herek, 2007; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), then men who are labeled as gay—but not men who are labeled as heterosexual—should be de-racialized in in the minds of perceivers. By contrast, if de-racialization effects stem from the fact that gay men are simply a more specialized subset of their racial category than are non-gay men (Hinzman & Maddox, 2017; Kunda & Oleson, 1995), and if being more specialized is what de-racializes targets, then perhaps adding any adjective to the racial category that restricts its inclusiveness (including the adjective “straight”) will lead to de-racialization effects. Experiment 1c tested whether men who are explicitly labeled as heterosexual (vs. not) are de-racialized.