The Acquisition, Transmission, and Discussion of Social Stereotypes

Park and Hastie (1987) argued that the mode of stereotype acquisition should influence the perceived variability of the group. Given that abstractionbased stereotypes are most likely communicated as abstract descriptions that describe the group as a whole, the perceived variability within the group should be relatively low. Instance-based stereotypes, however, contain not only group-level information but also

representations of individual group members. As a result, perceivers should see the target group as being more variable, with differences among the individual group members.