ABSTRACT
The social psychological study of stereotyping and intergroup behavior has had a somewhat unusual place in the history of this discipline. Whereas most of the "traditionally important" topics in social psychology are concerned with processes (e.g., attitude change, interpersonal attraction, impression formation, conformity, bargaining), research on stereotyping and intergroup behavior has focused on the effects of ethnicity as a stimulus variable, merely noting the consequences of this stimulus property for various outcome measures. Although this distinction is perhaps a bit overdrawn, it is not difficult to cite instances in the research literature that lend some validity to this view. For example, whereas most research on person perception has been concerned with the processes by which a perceiver combines and integrates disparate pieces of information about a target person in making judgments of that person (Hamilton, 1980), studies of stereotypes have focused largely on the content of subjects' stereotypic conceptions of various racial, religious, and national groups (cf. Brigham, 1971, for a review). Similarly, whereas research on attitude change has studied the processes mediating the effects of such variables as communicator characteristics, message characteristics, and recipient's prior beliefs on subsequent attitudes, studies of intergroup attitudes have been primarily concerned with the effects of one situational variable—whether or not the setting provides for intergroup contact—on attitude change, with little direct attention aimed at examining possible mediating processes (Amir, 1976; Rose, Chapter 8, this volume). Thus, there has been a failure to recognize the inherent interrelationship between the study of stereotyping and intergroup behavior and the investigation of basic social psychological processes. Rather, the tendency has been to consider sex, race, and ethnicity as "special topics" within the field. The unfortunate consequence is that research on these topics has become somewhat divorced from research and theorizing in mainstream social psychology
