ABSTRACT
Social categories provide an essential tool for simplifying and making sense of the complex social environment in which we live. By assigning others to various social categories (e.g., adult, female, lawyer), we develop and apply mental rules that allow us to learn from past situations and generalize to new ones. In doing so, however, we run the risk of oversimplifying and overgeneralizing. As useful as it is to identify common properties of the members of a group, it is also essential to make distinctions. Thus, recent research on stereotyping and intergroup behavior has looked beyond simple perceptions of group stereotypes to examine ways in which people perceive variability and make distinctions among members of a group.
