Decision letter for "Symbols and labels: Children's awareness of social categories in a divided society"

Processes involving an automatic activation of stereotypes in different contexts were investigated using a priming paradigm with the lexical decision task. The names of social categories were combined with background pictures of specific situations to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Significant category priming effects for stereotypic attributes (e.g., Bavarians – beer) emerged for fitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a marquee) but not for nonfitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a shop). Findings indicate that social stereotypes are organized as specific mental schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and context information.

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Cognitive Components of Ingroup Projection

Social Psychology ◽

10.1027/1864-9335/a000156 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 15-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Maya Machunsky ◽

Thorsten Meiser

Keyword(s):

Mental Representation ◽

Cognitive Representation ◽

Social Categories ◽

Projection Model ◽

Minimal Group ◽

Model Experiments ◽

Superordinate Category ◽

Cognitive Components ◽

Per Se

This research investigated whether relative ingroup prototypicality (i.e., the tendency to perceive one’s own ingroup as more prototypical of a superordinate category than the outgroup) can result from a prototype-based versus exemplar-based mental representation of social categories, rather than from ingroup membership per se as previously suggested by the ingroup projection model. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a prototype-based group was perceived as more prototypical of a superordinate category than an exemplar-based group supporting the hypothesis that an intergroup context is not necessary for biased prototypicality judgments. Experiment 3 introduced an intergroup context in a minimal-group-like paradigm. The findings demonstrated that both the kind of cognitive representation and motivational processes contribute to biased prototypicality judgments in intergroup settings.

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