Stereotyping and Prejudice

Abstract

The last chapter presented important and productive work on the multiple-knowing-processes model, but its focus on internal processes, like that of the information-processing tradition (Chapter 4) more generally, may lose sight of the social context of knowing. Here, we widen the view to take it in, secure in our knowledge from the last chapter that breadth can be achieved without sacrificing depth of understanding. Research in the last two chapters typically provided written information about an unaffiliated individual’s behaviors and traits. Here, we cover research including information about a target’s group membership, thus activating emotions associated with his or her being “one of us” or “one of them.” In Chapter 11, we further widen the view and cover research on social judgments made during interpersonal communication, such as while conversing with or about targets. Stereotyping and prejudice, the involvement of culturally shared schemas in affectively charged intergroup knowing, are socially significant social cognitive phenomena long discussed in the constructivist tradition (Chapter 3). Contemporary work advances understanding with articulated theories and well-developed research paradigms, in which these phenomena are activated under controlled conditions so that their complexity can be penetrated.