In Search of Similarity: Stereotypes as Naive Theories in Social Categorization

Traditionally, models of categorization have been based on the premise that, in categorization, stimuli are grouped together because they appear similar to each other. In the social domain, where categorization processes are thought to play an important role in the phenomenon of stereotyping, such a similarity-based conception of category organization seems inadequate. Stereotypes, as categorical knowledge associated with social groups, generally reflect the perceiver's subjective construal of similarity relations in the social environment, instead of these similarity relations being based on an a priori structure of attribute covariations. Moreover, people's knowledge about social categories generally goes beyond assumptions regarding the presence or absence of category attributes that presumably define similarity relations. In many instances, social categorical knowledge includes important assumptions about how group attributes are related to one another; and the grouping of the social environment therefore reflects the perceiver's inferences and causal attributions based on this knowledge. Two experiments are reported to illustrate these arguments. The possibility of conceptualizing stereotypes as social knowledge organized by the perceiver's naive theories is explored as an alternative to a purely similarity-based categorization model.