Understanding Stereotypes and Attribution Biases

What are stereotypes?

Widely shared and evaluative images of a social category and its members.

How are stereotypes acquired?

They are acquired from people around us, including parents, teachers, peers, and the media.

What is a key characteristic of stereotypes regarding change?

Stereotypes are resistant to change.

What cognitive benefit do stereotypes provide?

They offer a fast way of making judgments, saving cognitive resources.

How do stereotypes affect perceptions of individuals?

They lead to highly inaccurate impressions of people who do not fit the stereotype.

What was the main finding of Haire & Grune's (1950) study on stereotypes?

Participants struggled to include the characteristic 'intelligent' when describing a 'working class man', distorting or ignoring it due to stereotype inconsistency.

What does Hunzaker (2014) suggest about stereotypes and adversity?

Stereotypes can justify people's experiences of adversity, such as attributing poor people's struggles to a lack of intelligence.

What was the key difference in the stories given to participants in Hunzaker's study?

The difference was whether the character received severance pay after losing his job.

What is social attribution?

The process by which we seek to identify the causes of our own and others' behavior.

What are the two types of attributions?

Dispositional (individual characteristics) and situational (environmental factors).

What is attribution bias?

Systematic errors made when evaluating or finding reasons for behaviors.

What is the fundamental attribution error?

The tendency to overestimate dispositional causes and underestimate situational causes in others' behaviors.

What did Ross, Amabile & Steinmetz (1977) find in their experiments?

Hosts were rated as more knowledgeable than contestants, despite the hosts' advantage in asking questions based on their expertise.

What cultural factors contribute to the fundamental attribution error?

Individualist cultures focus on the individual rather than the context.

What is the actor-observer effect?

The tendency to attribute one's own behavior to situational causes while attributing others' behavior to dispositional causes.

What is self-serving bias?

The tendency to attribute positive outcomes internally and negative outcomes externally.

What is the ultimate attribution error?

Attributing bad outgroup behavior to dispositional causes and good ingroup behavior to situational causes.

What is the Cognitive Bias Codex?

A categorization of cognitive biases that helps to identify and understand various biases.

What is perspective taking?

Looking at a situation from a viewpoint that is different from one's usual viewpoint.

What was the finding of Vescio et al. (2003) regarding perspective taking?

Participants who engaged in perspective taking reported more pro-black attitudes.

What did Skorinko & Sinclair (2013) find about perspective taking and stereotypes?

Perspective takers wrote more stereotypic essays when shown a stereotype-consistent image, but less stereotypic essays with an ambiguous image.

What is essentialism in the context of attributions?

The tendency to see behavior in terms of underlying or innate properties of people or groups.

How can perspective taking affect empathy?

It can lead to more situational attributions and increased empathy.

What is a potential limitation of perspective taking?

Simple and highly salient stereotypes can limit its effectiveness.

What is the role of cognitive biases in social perception?

Cognitive biases can distort our understanding of social interactions and behaviors.

How do stereotypes exaggerate perceptions?

They accentuate similarities within and differences between categories.