PSYC12H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Subcategorization, Authoritarianism, Contact Hypothesis
Document Summary
Chapter 2 origin and maintenance of stereotypes and prejudice: the formation of stereotypes. Cognitive psychologists of the 1960s found that the human brain seems to almost automatically classify or categorize similar objects in the environment. Most psychologists now think of stereotypes as a natural consequence of cognition. The reason people categorize is because we have a limited-capacity cognitive system, which cannot simultaneously process all available information about the social environment. Based on aristotle"s principle of association, we assume that things are similar on the basis of one feature will likely have other notable similarities on a number of dimensions. Basic categories like age, race, and gender have very strong influences on how the perceiver interprets most of the other information about the perceived individual. Other researchers believe that seeing and perceiving category words are not the same. I. e. , when people hear a category word (e. g. , hispanic), we automatically think of stereotypes for that group.
