Is stereotyping a default response? A new look at stereotypes and first impressions

What is it about?

When we form impressions of other people, we often have different kinds of information available. We might know about the social categories a person belongs to, such as their occupation, as well as other information about their individual behaviors, interests, or experiences, such as that they recently hosted a party. Many theories suggest that people rely too heavily on social categories and stereotypes when making inferences about others. According to these accounts, this tendency reflects biases in information processing, due to information about social categories intrinsically easier to process. For example, category information may come to mind more readily and therefore exert a stronger influence on judgments. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to determine whether categories are truly overused because of these processing biases, or whether people are simply using information in a way that reflects their existing beliefs, whether those beliefs are accurate or not. In this research, we developed a new Bayesian modeling approach that allowed us to specifically identify these types of processing biases. Across seven studies involving more than 1,800 participants, we examined how people combined occupation categories with other information when making inferences about a person. Contrary to common assumptions, we found little evidence that intrinsic processing biases led people to overuse occupation categories. In most cases, participants combined categories with other information in a manner that was broadly consistent with how informative they believed each piece of information to be, and therefore consistent with their own beliefs (although those beliefs themselves could still be biased or inaccurate). These findings challenge the idea that people have a default tendency to overuse social categories, simply because of the way category information is processed. Instead, biases toward overusing social categories emerged only when the context encouraged people to prioritize categories: specifically when occupation information was especially relevant to people's current goals and their cognitive resources were limited. Overall, the findings suggest that overreliance on stereotypes is not simply a default tendency, but depends importantly on the context in which judgments are made.

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Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Concerns about stereotyping often assume biases in people's inference process that lead them to place too much weight on social categories, such as occupations, race, or gender, when judging others. This is the first work able to directly identify these kinds of processing biases, by providing a new method for distinguishing between two very different sources of error: inaccurate beliefs about groups, versus biased ways of using those beliefs. This distinction matters because different problems require different solutions. For example, reducing biased information processing may require different interventions than correcting inaccurate beliefs. More broadly, the findings suggest that category-based biases may arise less from a default tendency to think in stereotypes, and more from specific contexts that direct attention toward category information. Understanding when this happens can help researchers, organizations, and policymakers design more effective strategies for reducing biased judgments and improving decision-making.

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