🧠 Formation of Stereotypes and Their Effects on Behaviour

📌 Key terms

Term	Definition
Stereotype	A mental representation (schema) of a group and its members — a fixed, oversimplified belief often resistant to change.
Stereotyping	The process of assigning characteristics to someone based solely on group membership.
Social Categorization	Classifying people into groups based on perceived similarities (e.g., gender, ethnicity, occupation).
Illusory Correlation	Perceiving a relationship between two variables (e.g., group membership and behavior) even when none exists.
Stereotype Threat	Fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group, which can negatively affect performance.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy	When expectations about others lead them to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
Confirmation Bias	Tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs.
Grain of Truth Hypothesis	Suggests stereotypes may originate from small but real differences, later exaggerated or overgeneralized.

Aim:
To investigate how stereotypes form through illusory correlation between group membership and behavior.

Procedure:

• Participants read statements about two groups (A and B) performing positive or negative behaviors.
• Group A (majority) performed more positive acts; Group B (minority) fewer acts overall, with the same positive-to-negative ratio.

Findings:

• Participants overestimated the number of negative behaviors by Group B.
• They associated the minority group with negative traits, even though both groups behaved similarly.

Conclusion:

• Stereotypes can form through cognitive errors — humans notice distinctive events (minority + negative) and exaggerate correlations.

Evaluation:
✅ High control → cause-and-effect link between cognition and stereotype formation.
⚠️ Artificial task → low ecological validity.
✅ Highly influential in cognitive origins of prejudice.

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3️⃣ Grain of Truth Hypothesis

• Suggests that stereotypes may stem from real experiences with individuals from a group, then overgeneralized.
• Example: Meeting one rude tourist → believing “all tourists are rude.”
• Criticized for assuming all stereotypes have factual bases.

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🧠 Effects of Stereotypes on Behaviour

1️⃣ Stereotype Threat – Steele & Aronson (1995)

Aim:
To test whether stereotype threat affects African-American students’ academic performance.

Procedure:

• Participants: African-American and White college students.
• Two conditions:
  1. Diagnostic — test described as measuring intelligence.
  2. Non-diagnostic — same test, described as unrelated to ability.

Findings:

• African-American students performed worse in the diagnostic condition.
• When the stereotype of “African-Americans perform poorly” was activated, anxiety impaired performance.

Conclusion:

• Awareness of stereotypes can negatively impact performance — a self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

Evaluation:
✅ Strong experimental design → causal relationship.
⚠️ Cultural bias (US context).
✅ Replicated in gender studies (e.g., Spencer et al., 1999).

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2️⃣ Gender Stereotype Threat – Spencer et al. (1999)

Aim:
To investigate if women’s math performance is affected by stereotype activation.

Procedure:

• Male and female university students completed math tests under two conditions:
  1. Stereotype-activated: Told men perform better in math.
  2. Control: Told no gender differences exist.