ABSTRACT
It is difficult to think of a topic in social psychology that has more obvious and important societal implications and yet has yielded less progress toward increasing our knowledge and understanding than research on stereotypes. The reasons for the lack of progress in this area are not entirely clear. Certainly the persistence of psychologists in adhering to the Katz-Braly adjective checklist method of assessing stereotypes has been a contributing factor. Although this methodology was a useful contribution when it was introduced over four decades ago (Katz & Braly, 1933), it unfortunately became almost the sole paradigm for studying stereotypes in the intervening years (cf. Brigham, 1971, for a critique of this method). One consequence of this reliance on a single paradigm is that a rather narrow range of questions has been investigated in stereotype research. Because the method is essentially designed to assess stereotypes, the findings from most studies are limited to providing descriptions of the content of stereotypic conceptions of various ethnic groups. With the exception of the work on ethnic preferences (cf. Brand, Ruiz, & Padilla, 1974), remarkably little research has addressed the questions of how stereotypes develop, the conditions under which they are used, and their consequences for interpersonal behavior. For these and other reasons, the study of stereotyping has become a somewhat stagnant research area, an isolated topic that until recently has remained uninfluenced by developments in other areas of person perception research. Fortunately, there are some recent signs that tills state of affairs may be changing.
