The India Face Set: International and Cultural Boundaries Impact Face Impressions and Perceptions of Category Membership

This paper serves three specific goals. First, it reports the development of an Indian Asian face set, to serve as a free resource for psychological research. Second, it examines whether the use of pre-tested U.S.-specific norms for stimulus selection or weighting may introduce experimental confounds in studies involving non-U.S. face stimuli and/or non-U.S. participants. Specifically, it examines whether subjective impressions of the face stimuli are culturally dependent, and the extent to which these impressions reflect social stereotypes and ingroup favoritism. Third, the paper investigates whether differences in face familiarity impact accuracy in identifying face ethnicity. To this end, face images drawn from volunteers in India as well as a subset of Caucasian face images from the Chicago Face Database were presented to Indian and U.S. participants, and rated on a range of measures, such as perceived attractiveness, warmth, and social status. Results show significant differences in the overall valence of ratings of ingroup and outgroup faces. In addition, the impression ratings show minor differentiation along two basic stereotype dimensions, competence and trustworthiness, but not warmth. We also find participants to show significantly greater accuracy in correctly identifying the ethnicity of ingroup faces, relative to outgroup faces. This effect is found to be mediated by ingroup-outgroup differences in perceived group typicality of the target faces. Implications for research on intergroup relations in a cross-cultural context are discussed. &nbsp;</p

Stereotypes as social concepts in a knowledge-based approach to categorization.

Consistent with general work on conceptual knowledge, current approaches to social categorization and stereotyping adhere to the notion of similarity. That is, the perceiver is thought to group people according to how similar they appear on certain attribute dimensions, with similar people belonging to the same group and dissimilar people belonging to different groups. Consequently, the perceiver's categorical knowledge about the social environment is assumed to be comprised of beliefs regarding attributes that group members have in common. Stereotypes in particular are considered a distinct subset of this knowledge that consists of more or less overgeneralized beliefs. The current research challenges this conception of stereotypes as attribute descriptions of social groups. It is argued that attribute similarity is an insufficient criterion in order to explain the organization of social knowledge. Often social stereotypes include attributes that are neither characteristic nor defining features of the stereotyped group, and similarity per se does not offer a sufficient rationale to determine why these attributes are associated with the target group, whereas others are not. Furthermore, people's social knowledge appears to be much richer than mere assumptions regarding what attributes are believed to be common among a group of people. Instead, people often hold a rather elaborate knowledge about social groups, explaining, for example, why these groups are supposedly what they are. The current research therefore views stereotypes as naive theories about groups that are linked to a perceiver's general world knowledge, and that provide assumptions about group attributes as well as explanations about the underlying causal relations between these attributes. A set of three experiments examines the role of social knowledge in categorization. Study 1 illustrates how the perceiver's background knowledge serves as a constraint in the observation of a given empirical feature structure, thus defining stimulus similarity and the partitions imposed on the social environment. The consecutive studies investigate how stereotypic social knowledge may operate in the processing of social information and how it may influence related social judgements. Results from these studies support the assumption that stereotypes provide mental models for the perceiver's subjective representation of social information.Ph.D.PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104054/1/9423345.pdfDescription of 9423345.pdf : Restricted to UM users only

Evidence for racial prejudice at the implicit level and its relationship with questionnaire measures.

The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring aword-nonword decision. The target stimuli included attributes that varied in valence and stereotypicality for Whites and African Americans. Results howed reliable stereotyping and prejudice ffects: Black primes resulted in substantially stronger facilitation to negative than positive stereotypic attributes, whereas White primes facilitated positive more than negative stereotypic traits. The magnitude of this implicit prejudice ffect correlated reliably with participants &apos; scores on explicit racial attitude measures, indicating that people&apos;s pontaneous stereo-typic associations are consistent with their more controlled responses. Over the past 40 years, opinion surveys have documented substantial changes in racial attitudes among White American

Creating Social Reality: Informational Social Influence and the Content of Stereotypic Beliefs

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that comparison information about other people's stereotypic beliefs is used to validate personal beliefs about a target group. A simple manipulation of questionnaire items and their response scales, presented as part of a political opinion survey, served as social comparison information regarding beliefs about African Americans. The comparison information influenced participants' subsequently measured beliefs about group as well as their evaluation of a Black target. When provided with negative comparison information, participants reported more negative racial beliefs and a more negative evaluation of the Black target than when provided with positive feedback. Moreover; this effect depended on participants' initial stereotypic beliefs. Only participants with initially negative beliefs about the target group were influenced by the comparison information; participants with relatively positive beliefs were not.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68405/2/10.1177_0146167296226005.pd