Research in the School of Psychology has been helping uncover the origins of stereotypes.
Stereotypes are bits of information associated with social categories (e.g., Scottish people are miserly, scientists are geeky, and men like the colour blue). Regardless of whether we believe them to be true we all have extensive knowledge of cultural stereotypes. But how does this information become associated with certain groups in the first place?
Research suggests stereotypes might be the unintended but inevitable consequence of sharing social information. Research from the School of Psychology, led by Dr Doug Martin, investigated how social information evolves when it is repeatedly passed from person to person. They found that as it is continually shared, social knowledge becomes simplified and organised categorically and, consequently, becomes more easily learnable. Over time social information that is initially random, complex and very difficult to remember, becomes a simple system of category stereotypes that can be learned easily.
Dr Martin’s team came to their conclusions following innovative lab experiments using social transmission chains (bit like the game often called ‘Telephone’ where a message is repeatedly passed from person to person). They asked people to remember information about novel ‘alien’ characters and then passed whatever each person remembered as the learning materials for the next person in the chain. Volunteers were asked to learn personality attributes that described the aliens, all of whom shared certain physical features such as their colour, their shape, or the way they moved. Each person was then tested to see what they could remember. Whatever information they produced was then passed on to be learned by the next volunteer and so on until a chain of information was created.
The information people remembered changed as is passed from person to person. What began as a chaotic and random association of aliens and attributes became simpler, more structured, and easier to learn. By the end of the chains, it looked like novel stereotypes had formed, with physical features – such as colour – strongly associated with the possession of specific personality attributes. For example, by the end of one chain, all blue aliens were remembered to be “friendly”, whereas all red aliens were remembered to be “arrogant”.
It seems stereotypes might form and evolve because people share similar cognitive limitations and biases. People are more likely to confuse the identity of individuals when they belong to the same social category than when they belong to different categories. Similarly, people are more likely to mistakenly think that individuals who belong to the same social category also share the same attributes. Because we all experience the same category-based memory biases, when social information is repeatedly shared it is continually filtered as it passes from one mind to the next until eventually it becomes organised categorically and a stereotype has formed.
This research suggests cultural stereotypes are the inevitable and unintentional consequence of human interaction and as a result are slowly but constantly evolving. If this is right, then understanding how cultural stereotypes form and naturally evolve might allow future interventions to positively influence their content.
Read about this research on the BBC or read the full research article.
Find out about the School of Psychology researchers behind it:
Dr Doug Martin and Dr Jacqui Hutchison
