ABSTRACT
The study of group stereotypes and their effects on judgments of individuals is a long-standing and still very active tradition in the field. The main theme of this body of work is that to the extent that we possess stereotypes, which I will define as sets of “beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people” (Ashmore & Del Boca, 1981, p. 16), we use them to structure our impressions of individual members of those groups. In fact, some evidence suggests that stereotypes may be activated automatically, upon merely encountering an individual who belongs to a relevant social category (e.g., Augoustinos, Ahrens, & Innes, 1994; Devine, 1989; Perdue & Gurtman, 1990; cf. Blair & Banaji, 1996; Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Lepore & Brown, 1997; Locke, MacLeod, & Walker, 1994). In this sense, they are highly available standards or expectations, ready for use in evaluating others. Stereotypes are generally assumed to function as expectations or interpretive frames toward which judgments of individual targets are drawn (assimilated). For example, we tend to perceive and judge individual women, blacks, soccer hooligans, and hairdressers in accordance with our group stereotypes (see Brewer, 1996; Fiske, 1998; Hamilton & Sherman, 1994; Hilton & von Hippel, 1996; Stangor & Lange, 1994; von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & Vargas, 1995, for recent reviews), particularly when category information is available prior to encoding of other information about the target (Bodenhausen, 1988; Park & Hastie, 1987).
