The Consequences of Communicating Social Stereotypes

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 36, 567–599 (2000) doi:10.1006/jesp.1999.1419, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

The Consequences of Communicating Social Stereotypes Micah S. Thompson, Charles M. Judd, and Bernadette Park University of Colorado Received June 21, 1999; revised October 29, 1999; accepted October 29, 1999 At the extreme, social stereotypes can be learned either from direct contact with individual target group members or from communications about the target group received from others. These two forms of stereotype acquisition have consequences for the nature and content of the stereotype that is formed (Park & Hastie, 1987). The present studies examine these consequences using, in the first study, a rumor transmission design and, in the second, group discussions. The first study demonstrates that stereotypes that are received from others are more extreme, contain less variability information, and have higher social consensus than stereotypes learned from contact with individual target group members. The second study demonstrates that stereotypes that are communicated and learned through informal group discussions manifest the same properties. We argue that stereotypes are fundamentally altered through social communication and these effects are in part responsible for the biases that stereotypes induce. © 2000 Academic Press A shopkeeper who has lived his entire life in a small town in Montana has never had any contact with real, live black people, but he “knows” they are shiftless, lazy, and oversexed. . . [This] shopkeeper was certainly not born with an unflattering stereotype of black people in his head—somebody, somehow, put it there. —Aronson, The Social Animal

Contrast this hypothetical Montana shopkeeper with another shopkeeper, a White American who has lived his life in Atlanta, in the middle of a big, bustling urban environment where the majority of the residents are African American. He too has a stereotype of African Americans in his head, and in part it too was likely put there by somebody, somehow. But additionally, this Atlanta shopkeeper has had many individual encounters with African Americans. They come to his store; he encounters them on the street, he knows them in his church; he The research reported in this article was partially supported by NIMH Grant R01 MH45049 to the second and third authors. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Charles M. Judd, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0345. E-mail: [email protected]. 567 0022-1031/00 $35.00 Copyright © 2000 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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is likely to have African American neighbors. To some extent, then, this Atlanta shopkeeper has acquired his stereotype rather differently from the one in Montana. The Atlanta shopkeeper has impressions of many, many individual African Americans and one would certainly expect that these would somehow influence the stereotype he carries around in his head. Park and Hastie (1987) have contrasted the two different ways that stereotypes might have been acquired by our Montana and Atlanta shopkeepers. At one extreme, consistent with the Montana scenario, Park and Hastie (1987) refer to “abstraction-based” stereotypes, learned from significant socializing agents, acquired intact from them, rather than developed on the basis of any kind of direct experience with members of the social category. At the other extreme, more consistent with the Atlanta scenario, stereotypes are “instance-based,” formed on the basis of direct contact and experience with individual category members. Of course, these two forms of stereotype acquisition are never found in their pure form, either in Montana or in Atlanta. Both shopkeepers reside at some point along the continuum that separates the two extremes. But the important point is that there are differences in how stereotypes are acquired and these may have important consequences. 1 Park and Hastie (1987) examined some of these consequences, focusing in particular on differences in perceived group variability as a function of whether the stereotype is primarily abstraction-based or instance-based. They hypothesized that stereotypes that are instance-based have associated with them representations of a variety of specific individual group members, whereas abstraction-based stereotypes do not. Accordingly they hypothesized that when a stereotype of a group is more instance-based, the group ought to be perceived as more variable than when a stereotype is more abstraction-based. The focus on perceived group variability, as a component of the stereotype that would likely be affected by whether it is instance-based or abstraction-based, derives from the important consequences that variability is known to have in stereotyping. Indeed, in their first study, Park and Hastie (1987) showed that individuals who perceived less group variability, as compared to those who perceived higher group variability, were more likely to generalize information about a single group member to the group as a whole and were also more likely to rate typical behaviors (vs atypical behaviors) as being performed by group members. Perceived group variability also has been shown to determine the 1 The distinction that we are making here and that was made by Park and Hastie (1987) concerns the form of the information that leads to stereotype formation: we can learn about a group either through communicated abstractions or through first-hand knowledge of specific group instances. It is important to emphasize that this distinction is somewhat different from the classic distinction made in the stereotyping field between whether a group stereotype is represented in memory as an abstract prototype or as a set of instances or exemplars. Although it may be the case that abstraction-based stereotypes and instance-based stereotypes are typically represented in different ways, the present research is focused on the consequences of the two forms of stereotype formation, not on the consequences of the two forms of representation.

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extent to which a stereotype will be applied to newly encountered group members, with individuating information playing a larger role in impression formation, and the group stereotype a smaller role, when the relevant group is perceived to be more variable (Ryan, Judd, & Park, 1996). And finally, the Park and Hastie hypothesis was entirely consistent with the extensive literature that has documented important in-group– out-group differences in perceived variability (e.g., Judd & Park, 1988; Linville, Fisher, & Salovey, 1989; Park & Rothbart, 1982). To test their idea that abstraction-based stereotypes result in less perceived group variability, Park and Hastie (1987, Experiment 2) asked participants to form an impression of a hypothetical group that was described as generally intelligent and sociable, conveyed through two kinds of information. Participants read 28 instances of behaviors that specific group members had engaged in (14 conveying the intelligent information and 14 conveying sociability information). And they also read three abstract descriptions of what the group was like, written supposedly by three individuals who knew the group well. Through pretesting, they had established that the two kinds of information conveyed similar mean impressions of the group. The important manipulation was the order in which the two kinds of information was encountered. Participants in the instance-first condition read the 28 behavioral instances, wrote a short paragraph describing their initial impression of the group, then read the three abstract descriptions, and finally completed dependent measures, assessing judgments of group central tendency and variability. Participants in the abstraction-first condition read the three abstractions, wrote a short impression, then read the 28 instances, and last completed the dependent measures. Thus, all participants encountered the same information about the group, but the basis for the initial impressions was either the instances or the abstractions. Consistent with their hypothesis, Park and Hastie (1987) found that participants in the instance-first condition perceived the group to be significantly more variable than participants in the abstract-first condition. Analyses of the perceptions of the group central tendency showed no condition differences. So the group was rated as equally intelligent and sociable for both the instance-first and abstract-first conditions. In addition, there were no condition differences on memory for confirming or disconfirming behavioral instances, suggesting that the difference in perceived group variability between the conditions was not due to memory differences for the two kinds of information. Although Park and Hastie’s (1987) research is quite informative about some of the differences that may result from abstraction-based versus instance-based stereotype acquisition, it does suffer from one major drawback. Because they were primarily interested in the effects of abstractions versus instances on the perceived variability of the group, they went to some lengths to construct the abstract descriptions of the group so that these would convey exactly the same impression as the instance information of where the group stood on average on

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the two trait dimensions of interest. They did not want the difference in the kind of information that was presented to participants to be confounded with differences in the mean impression that would be formed on the basis of that information. This experimental control is admirable, yet it leaves begging a central question. Because the experimenters constructed the abstractions that were given to participants, we don’t really know whether those abstractions resemble the sort of abstractions about social groups that are communicated and that are actually the basis of abstraction-based stereotype formation outside of the experimental laboratory. The goal of the present work is to more fully understand some of the consequences of communicating social stereotypes. Like Park and Hastie (1987), we believe that there are important differences between abstraction-based stereotypes and instance-based stereotypes, yet to more fully understand those differences we need to understand how abstractions of groups are actually formed and communicated. Fundamentally, abstraction-based stereotypes are group impressions that have been communicated from others. There are a variety of different research traditions in social psychology that suggest that the process of such communication fundamentally alters the content of the information that is in fact communicated. We turn to these literatures in order to more fully understand how stereotypes acquired via such communications might be expected to differ from stereotypes acquired by actual encounters with group instances. Consequences of Communication A basic premise of work on communication is that there are certain norms that guide communication, that affect both the content and form of communications (Clark, 1985; Grice, 1975). These include norms of relevance and brevity: communications should be maximally informative but not contain redundant information. A number of lines of empirical work in social psychology have explored some of the consequences of those norms. First, researchers in the “cognitive tuning” tradition have focused on how the anticipation of communication alters the representation of information (Brock & Fromkin, 1968; Cohen, 1961; Harkins, Harvey, Keithly, & Rich, 1977; Harvey, Harkins, & Kagehiro, 1976; Leventhal, 1962; Zajonc, 1960). Compared to participants who expect to receive further information on some subject, those who anticipate communicating the information they have already received develop more polarized and simplified representations of that information. Higgins (1992; Higgins, McCann, & Fondacaro, 1982) has further shown that these differences arise simply from the anticipation of communication rather than deriving from differences in the anticipation of new information. Additionally, Higgins explored the consequences of communication for the person who is the target of that communication, as well as the consequences for the source of the communication. Here, conclusions are very similar to those reached in other work that has attempted to understand the transmission of rumors. Allport and Postman (1947) suggest that

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as a rumor gets passed from one person to another it is both “leveled” and “sharpened.” Leveling refers to the tendency for a rumor to become shorter and more concise as it is transmitted, leaving out details and retaining an easily communicated essence. Sharpening refers to the content of that essence that is communicated; details are not randomly omitted—rather, details that detract from or qualify the essence are selectively omitted. Further, De Fleur (1962) identifies two kinds of sharpening, that by selection and that by intensification. Selective sharpening means that details that detract from the essence of a message are deleted as it is passed. Sharpening by intensification means that details that are retained, that contribute to the essence of the message, may be exaggerated. Gilovich (1987) applied these arguments to understand how communicated impressions of an individual target person differ from impressions formed by first-hand familiarity with the target individual. Participants in the firsthand condition watched a videotape of a male or female target individual describing negative events in their lives. After watching this video, they rated the target individual on a number of trait dimensions and then were asked to provide on audiotape “an account that would allow someone listening to the tape to determine what the person did and what the person was like” (p. 63). Next, paired participants in the secondhand condition listened to the tape-recorded description of the target from the firsthand participant and then rated the target. Gilovich found that second-generation participants rated the target more extremely than did first-generation participants. In a naturalistic replication of this effect, Gilovich found that individuals’ impressions of someone they had frequently heard about from a friend were more extreme than their friends’ impressions of the same person. Extending Gilovich’s (1987) work to the domain of group impressions, we believe that communicated or abstraction-based stereotypes ought to differ from first-hand, or instance-based, stereotypes in at least two different ways. First, consistent with Park and Hastie’s (1987) results, abstraction-based stereotypes should contain less variability information. Information about group variability should be selectively omitted as a function of communication, since such information can be seen as information which qualifies a group stereotype. Additionally, we suggest that abstraction-based stereotypes should be more extreme than instance-based ones, a difference which Park and Hastie (1987) failed to examine since they constructed the abstractions in such a way that they conveyed exactly the same average stereotypes as did the instances. The two predictions we are making focus on the two different components of group stereotypes that have figured prominently in past work devoted to differences between in-group and out-group stereotypes (Judd & Park, 1993; Park & Judd, 1990): how stereotypically a group is perceived to be (i.e., the extremity of the group stereotype) and how dispersed it is perceived to be (i.e., the perceived variability of the group around its mean, regardless of the extremity of that mean). In general out-groups are seen to be both more stereotypic and less

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dispersed than are in-groups. We are suggesting that group stereotypes acquired via communicated abstractions, compared to those which are instance-based, should manifest similar differences: greater perceived stereotypicality and less perceived dispersion. 2 From the literature on communication that we have reviewed, there may in fact be two processes responsible for these effects. First, they may simply be produced by the fundamental distinction suggested by Park and Hastie (1987) that abstraction-based stereotypes are more stereotypic and less dispersed than instance-based stereotypes. On top of this, however, these differences may be augmented as a function of subsequent serial communication, following the rumor-transmission results, with those who learn communicated stereotypes third-hand, showing even stronger effects than those whose acquisition, although abstraction-based, is second-hand. In other words, differences as a function of the abstraction-based versus instance-based distinction may be augmented by subsequent transmission of those abstraction-based stereotypes. Gilovich’s work in the person perception domain (1987) was not able to separate out these two processes due to the fact that he never extended the communications beyond second-hand. One important additional prediction can be made about the effects of communication on group representations and how abstraction-based stereotypes are likely to differ from instance-based ones. One of the remarkable things about many social stereotypes is that they are widely shared. Although stereotypes can be defined as individual beliefs about social groups, they acquire their power in part because of the social consensus that surrounds many of them. Along with others (Haslam, 1997; Haslam, Oakes, McGarty, Turner, Reynolds, & Eggins, 1996; Schaller & Conway, 1999), we believe that this social consensus happens in part as a result of the fact that stereotypes may be learned from abstractions that are communicated from others. The processes that we have already discussed, that encourage communications to focus on a unified and intensified message, suggest that greater consensus among social stereotypes ought to be found when those stereotypes are based on communicated abstractions. And just like other beliefs, stereotypes define reality in the eyes of the believer to the extent that they are socially shared (Hardin & Higgins, 1996; Sherif, 1936). Haslam and colleagues (Haslam, 1997; Haslam et al. (1996) have recently reported studies in which they showed that when participants are told that other 2 It might seem that our predictions here conflict with those of Fazio and Zanna (1981), who have shown that direct experience with an attitude object leads to more accessible attitudes. We believe in fact there is no conflict between our predictions and those of Fazio and Zanna. While one may have direct experience with individual target group members, the target group as a social category always remains an abstraction, something with which one cannot have direct experience. The issue we are exploring is how the first-hand formation of beliefs about that abstraction, based on information about individual target group members, differs from the second-hand reception of those beliefs, not how direct contact with an individual target group member affects attitudes toward that specific target group member or toward other target members of the same group.

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in-group members endorse a stereotypic view, greater consensus in group stereotypes is achieved. This result is certainly consistent with our hypothesis that the formation of abstractions about a group and the communication of such abstractions to second-hand learners ought to result in greater consensus in those abstraction-based stereotypes. However, by focusing on the actual abstractions that participants construct and communicate to others, our approach to the issue of the development of consensus in group stereotypes is considerably more dynamic and richer than the demonstrations of Haslam et al., who provided experimentally constructed information about in-group and out-group endorsements of group stereotypes. A final issue concerns the equivalence of the information base that results in stereotype formation. The arguments that we have been developing argue that abstraction-based stereotypes will be more stereotypic, will contain less information about group dispersion, and will be more consensually held than stereotypes based on first-hand experience with group instances. In some ways, this prediction is not surprising, since the two sorts of stereotypes derive from very different sorts of information bases, with the process of communication reducing the information base in the ways we have described. One would like to demonstrate the power of these effects in the case where those who acquire their stereotypes from communicated abstractions also subsequently have access to the same rich information base of group instances upon which the instance-based participants formed their own stereotypes. Similar to Park and Hastie (1987), our intent would then be to examine differences as a function of how stereotypes are learned rather than differences attributable solely to the amount of information upon which they are based. Overview of Experiment 1 The overall purpose of Study 1 was to understand how stereotypes are communicated by socializing agents and how the stereotypes acquired from such secondhand communication differ from those generated by encountering group instances. Thus, Study 1 employed a rumor-transmission paradigm in which there were three sets of linked participants. The first set consisted of participants who were exposed to a set of group instances. They were asked to form an impression of the group and then to communicate this impression to participants in set two. Participants in set two were also asked to communicate their impression to set three participants. If abstraction-based stereotypes are more extreme, less dispersed, and more consensually held, then these differences should be manifest when we compare the stereotypes of participants in sets two and three with those of set one participants. If subsequent transmission of abstractions further accentuates those differences, then there should be differences between the stereotypes of set two and set three participants. Additionally, some participants in sets two and three, after they read the abstractions that earlier participants had written, were also shown the group instances seen by set one participants.

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STUDY 1 Method Overview and Design Participants were organized in groups of nine and linked in three triads of three persons within each nine-person group. Assignment to group and to triad within group was done on a random basis. 3 Participants in triad 1 were asked to form an impression of a hypothetical fraternity by reading 45 behaviors performed by different individual members of the fraternity. These behaviors conveyed information along three different trait dimensions. In general they gave the impression that fraternity members were academically competent, espoused liberal political views, and assumed leadership roles on campus. After reading these behaviors, these triad 1 participants were asked to write a one-page description of what the group was like, as if they were describing the group to a 1st-year student on campus who wanted to know about the various fraternities on campus. These participants then completed the dependent measures that assessed their impression of the group, including measures of stereotypicality and dispersion. Participants in triads 2 and 3 formed an impression of the same group but they did so on the basis of the impressions that participants in earlier triads had written. Thus, triad 2 participants in each group of nine read the three-page-long impressions that triad 1 participants in their group had written. Triad 3 participants in each group read the three page-long impressions that triad 2 participants in their group had written. Additionally, groups of nine participants were randomly assigned to either an abstraction-only condition or an abstraction-plusinstance condition. Triads 2 and 3 participants in the former condition, after reading the written impressions from the three previous participants in their group, wrote their own page-long impressions and then completed the dependent measures. In the abstraction-plus-instance groups, triads 2 and 3 participants, after reading the group impressions written by prior participants in their group, read the 45 behavioral instances that had been seen by all triad 1 participants. They then wrote their own impressions and completed the dependent variables. Thus, the two conditions differed in whether triads 2 and 3 participants formed their impressions only on the basis of the previous triad’s impressions or on the basis of those impressions plus the behavioral instances. In sum, the design was a 3 ⫻ 2 mixed design, treating groups of nine participants as the unit. Triad varied within groups and condition between them.

3 The first few participants could not be randomly assigned to triad since in fact no triad two participants in a group could be run prior to having a full set of triad one participants for that group. Subsequent to these first few participants, however, assignment to triad was randomly determined.

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Participants One-hundred sixty-two undergraduate students at the University of Colorado participated in partial fulfillment of an introductory psychology course requirement. They were grouped into 18 nine-person groups, although participants were actually run individually. Procedure All participants were told that the study concerned how people form impressions of a group. The specific instructions, however, depended on the triad and condition to which a participant had been randomly assigned. Triad 1. Upon arrival in the laboratory, triad 1 participants were told that they would learn about a fraternity from the University of Iowa by reading about a number of behaviors performed by members of this fraternity. They were told to form an impression of the group and to “think about what you would tell someone else if you were asked to describe this group.” Following these instructions, participants were handed a packet of 45 cards. On each card a different behavioral instance was printed. Participants were paced through the cards by the experimenter, who said “next” every 8 s as a cue for participants to go to the next card (thus taking 6 min to progress through all of the cards). After participants read the behavioral instances, the experimenter collected the cards and handed participants a single sheet of paper with instructions that they should write a one-page description of the group “that would communicate to someone else what you think members of this fraternity are like.” They were asked to imagine that their job was to describe the fraternity to an incoming freshman who wanted to know what the specific fraternities on campus were like. They were asked to be as accurate as possible in conveying their impression and to try to write in enough detail to fill the page. After writing their impressions, participants handed the sheet to the experimenter and were instructed to complete the dependent variables to assess their group perceptions. They also engaged in a free recall task, being asked to recall the behavioral instances they had seen. When finished, they were given a feedback sheet, debriefed, and dismissed. Triads 2 and 3. Participants in the second and third triads initially received instructions telling them that they would be learning about a fraternity at the University of Iowa. They were told that descriptions of the group had been gathered from three different individuals who knew them well and who had described them for incoming freshman at the University. They were to read these three descriptions and from them form their own impression of what the group was like. Again they were told to be as careful and thorough as possible and were given 2 min to read each of the three descriptions. Following this, procedures for triads 2 and 3 participants differed depending on condition. Those in the abstraction-only condition were then asked to write

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their own page-long written impression of the group, based on the information they had received, using instructions similar to those given the triad 1 participants. They then completed the dependent measures and were debriefed and dismissed. Participants in groups that were in the abstraction-plus-instance condition, after reading the three impressions that had been written by the participants in the previous triad, were asked to write two to three sentences that quickly summarized their impression of the group at that point. Then they were given similar instructions as those given to the triad 1 participants about reading through the 45 behavioral instances “in order to get a better understanding of what this group is like.” They were then paced through the 45 behavioral instance cards just as triad 1 participants had been. Following this, they wrote their page-long impressions of the group, completed the dependent variables (including performing a free recall of the behavioral instances), and were debriefed and dismissed. Stimulus Materials Triad 1 participants (and subsequent triad participants in the abstraction-plusinstance condition) read the 45 behavioral instances that are included in the Appendix. These gave information relevant to three different attribute dimensions: how academically competent the individual is, how liberal the individual is, and the extent to which the individual is in leadership positions. Fifteen behaviors were relevant to each of these attribute dimensions and within each set of 15, 12 confirmed the impression that the group was academically competent, politically liberal, and leaders, while 3 in each set were stereotype-inconsistent. Since these stimulus behaviors formed the basis of the initial impression of the target group for all participants, we did not think it necessary to collect pretest data on the scaling of these behaviors across the three dimensions. In general, we were confident that the behaviors would convey the impression that the group was academically competent, politically liberal, and leaders; triad and condition differences should emerge as variations in that impression. Dependent Measures To assess group impressions, three different measures were used: a percentage estimation task, a mean/range task, and a histogram or frequency distribution task. All of these have been used in our past research to assess the perceived stereotypicality and the perceived dispersion of groups (e.g., Park & Judd, 1990; Park, Ryan, & Judd, 1992; Ryan, Judd, & Park, 1996). Across all three of these tasks, participants were asked about whether members of the fraternity that they had learned about would agree or disagree with six different attitude statements. Two of these were relevant to each of the three attribute dimensions, and of these two, one was worded in such a way that greater agreement indicated that the group was seen more stereotypically and the other one was worded in the counterstereotypic direction. In Table 1 we present these six attitude statements. The first task asked participants to indicate what percentage of the group they

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TABLE 1 Attitude Statements Used in Dependent Measures Academic competence Stereotypic “I’m very proud of how well I am doing in college.” Counterstereotypic “I have a hard time getting myself to go to class.” Politically liberal Stereotypic “Cultural and ethnic diversity should be a top goal for universities.” Counterstereotypic “I have no sympathy for people who are on welfare and can’t take care of themselves.” Leadership Stereotypic “Taking a leadership role in campus activities is something I have enjoyed.” Counterstereotypic “I consider myself to be a very shy person.”

thought would agree with each attitude statement. Differences in perceived percentages of agreement with stereotypic and counterstereotypic items indicate greater perceived stereotypicality of the group, i.e., the group is judged to be more extreme in a stereotypic direction. The second task asked participants to consider a scale that varied from disagree strongly to agree strongly. On this scale (broken up into 20 units) they were first asked to indicate the extent to which they thought the typical group member would agree with each attitude statement. Once they did this, they were asked to further indicate where the person stood in the group who would most agree with the statement and where the person stood in the group who would most disagree with the statement. Again, from the mean rating of the group, perceived stereotypicality can be assessed, while the perceived dispersion of the group can be assessed by examining the magnitude of the range separating the two most extreme group members. On the final task, participants were asked to generate a histogram of the group, indicating at each of five levels from disagreement to agreement the relative number of group members who they thought would fall at each level. They did this by filling in vertical bars, as a subjective histogram or frequency distribution. Like the mean/range task, both perceived stereotypicality and dispersion can be examined with this task. The former is measured as the extremity of the mean of the histogram, with greater stereotypicality indicated by a higher mean on stereotypic items and a lower mean on counterstereotypic ones. Perceived dispersion is examined by computing the standard deviation of each participant’s histogram, thus assessing how variable the group was perceived to be on each item around its central tendency. All participants in triad 1 and those triad 2 and triad 3 participants who were in the abstraction-plus-instance condition were asked to recall the behavioral instances they had read after completing the group impression dependent variables. They were simply given a sheet of paper and asked to recall the instances as well as they could.

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Content Analyses of Written Abstractions In an attempt to understand the processes that produce our anticipated effects, we conducted a content analysis of the written abstractions provided by participants. Judges who were blind to group membership, triad membership, and condition rated each written abstraction on four different measures. Judges were told about the stereotype of the fraternity and shown the instances prior to making their judgments. They first judged the extent to which the written abstraction “conveyed information consistent with the group stereotype?” on a 1-to-4 scale. Second, judges rated on a 1-to-4 scale the extent to which the written abstraction “conveyed information about group variability.” Third, they noted the number of confirming instances explicitly mentioned in the abstractions. Finally, they coded the number of disconfirming instances explicitly mentioned. Naturally judges had the list of instances in front of them as they made these judgments. Two independent judges rated a set of 18 abstractions to establish interjudge reliability. Reliabilities were deemed to be acceptable (all r’s above .79) and all subsequent abstractions were coded by a single judge. Results The results we report are organized into five sections. In the first, we examine the effects of the independent variables on the perceived group stereotypicality, as assessed from the three different group rating tasks (percentage estimate, mean and range, and group histogram). In the second, we present results on the perceived group dispersion as measured on the range task and the histogram task. The third set of results present the content analyses that we conducted on the actual written abstractions that our participants provided. In the fourth set of results, we discuss differences in consensus or agreement between participants in their stereotypes of the group. Finally, we present results from the recall measure, for those participants who saw the behavioral instances. As described previously, groups of nine participants were treated as the unit of analyses, with triad varying within groups and condition between them. We collapsed across the three individual participants in each group at each of the three triad levels. Perceived Group Stereotypicality Three measures of group stereotypicality were analyzed, one from the estimates of the percentage in the group who would agree with each of the six attitude statements, one from the mean of the mean/range task, and one involving the mean of the histogram task. In each case, the group is seen more stereotypically if a higher rating (percentage or group mean) is given on the stereotypic statements and a lower rating is given on the counterstereotypic statements. Thus

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COMMUNICATING SOCIAL STEREOTYPES TABLE 2 Mean Perceived Stereotypicality of Target Groups by Triad (Study 1)

Percentage estimates Stereotypic Counterstereotypic Difference Mean of mean range Stereotypic Counterstereotypic Difference Mean of histogram Stereotypic Counterstereotypic Difference

Triad 1

Triad 2

Triad 3

71.00 21.11

76.55 18.36

77.53 16.83

49.89

58.19

60.70

14.22 5.26

15.27 4.66

15.16 4.41

8.96

10.61

10.75

3.70 2.41

3.91 2.25

3.87 2.25

1.29

1.66

1.62

judgments on all three tasks were analyzed as a function of triad and condition and whether the statement was stereotypic versus counterstereotypic. 4 All three measures of stereotypicality showed virtually identical results. First, there was a large stereotypicality difference on all three, with higher judgments given to the stereotypic statements than to the counterstereotypic ones [Percent F(1, 16) ⫽ 2067.06, p ⬍ .001; Mean/Range F(1, 16) ⫽ 1818.26, p ⬍ .001; Histogram F(1, 16) ⫽ 982.41, p ⬍ .001]. Not surprisingly, the group was seen as academically competent, politically liberal, and showing leadership. Second, as predicted, on all three tasks there was a significant triad by stereotypicality interaction [Percent F(2, 32) ⫽ 6.93, p ⬍ .01; Mean/Range F(2, 32) ⫽ 4.61, p ⬍ .05; Histogram F(2, 32) ⫽ 4.45, p ⬍ .05]. The relevant means, collapsing across condition, on all three measures are presented in Table 2, along with the mean differences between the stereotypic mean ratings and the counterstereotypic ones. As these make clear, the 2-degree-of-freedom interaction between stereotypicality and triad is clearly attributable to the difference in perceived stereotypicality between participants in the first triad and those in the second and third (all single df contrasts testing this component of the interaction are significant and none of the residual interaction tests are significant; Abelson & Prentice, 1997). Thus, those who learned of the group from abstractions written by previous participants saw the group in a more extremely stereotypic manner than those who were only 4

We also analyzed these data and all subsequent data including trait attribute (academics versus liberal ideology versus leadership) as an additional within-group factor. However, none of the effects we report were moderated by this factor. Hence all reported analyses collapse across the three trait dimensions.

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THOMPSON, JUDD, AND PARK TABLE 3 Mean Perceived Dispersion by Triad and Condition (Study 1) Condition

Triad 1

Triad 2

Triad 3

Abstract Only Abstract Plus

12.34 11.33

7.61 9.81

6.93 9.44

Abstract Only Abstract Plus

1.21 1.20

1.05 1.12

1.00 1.11

Range

Standard deviation

exposed to the behavioral instances from which those abstractions were composed. Differences attributable to further communication of an abstraction, between the second and third triad members, were not significant. Importantly, in no case did we find a triple interaction between stereotypicality, triad, and condition (all F’s ⬍ 1.20; all p’s ⬎ .25). Thus, triads 2 and 3 participants held more stereotypic views of the group than did triad 1 participants and this difference was unaffected by whether these later triad participants were exposed to the behavioral instances after they had read the abstractions written by previous-triad participants. Perceived Group Dispersion Two measures of perceived dispersion were analyzed: the magnitude of the range from the mean/range task and the standard deviation computed from the histograms generated by each participant. Here, differences in dispersion are indicated by differences in the magnitude of the range and standard deviation on both stereotypic and counterstereotypic items. In the case of both measures, there was a highly significant main effect of triad [Range F(2, 32) ⫽ 18.79, p ⬍ .001; Histogram SD F(2, 32) ⫽ 11.45, p ⬍ .001]. Again, this triad difference was clearly attributable to the difference between the perceived dispersion of triad 1 participants and participants in the later triads, as the means in Table 3 indicate. (Again, the single-degree-of-freedom contrast between triad 1 and triads 2 and 3 were both significant, while the residual difference, between triads 2 and 3, was not.) We present the means in Table 3 by condition, since in the case of the range task, there was a significant triad ⫻ condition interaction [F(1, 16) ⫽ 8.99, p ⬍ .01], and the interaction in the case of the histogram SD measure was in the same direction, although not significant [F(1, 16) ⫽ 2.12, p ⫽ .16]. Simple effects of the triad 1 versus triads 2 and 3 differences in each condition showed in both cases that the decrease in perceived dispersion from triad 1 to the later triads was significant in the abstraction-only condition [both F’s(1, 16) ⬎ 19.50, p’s ⬍ .001], but not in the abstraction-plusinstance condition [both F’s(1, 16) ⬍ 2.85, p’s ⬎ .12]. In sum, overall there is evidence that those participants who learned about the group from abstractions that had been written by others saw the group as less

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COMMUNICATING SOCIAL STEREOTYPES TABLE 4 Coded Content of the Written Abstractions by Triad and Condition (Study 1) Condition

Triad 1

Triad 2

Triad 3

Abstract Only Abstract Plus

2.33 2.48

2.74 2.79

3.00 2.96

Abstract Only Abstract Plus

2.14 2.04

1.37 2.15

1.04 2.22

How stereotypic?

Mention group variability?

dispersed than did participants who were in the first triad and who only learned about the group from exposure to the behavioral instance information. Like the stereotypicality results, there was no evidence that the serial communication of an abstraction, from triad 2 to triad 3, further affected the perceived dispersion of the group. Unlike the stereotypicality results, however, the difference in perceived dispersion between triad 1 participants and those in triads 2 and 3 seems to be moderated by condition, such that it is less true in those groups where triad 2 and triad 3 participants also read the behavioral instances after forming initial group impressions based on the written abstractions. While abstractions seem to induce perceived stereotypicality differences regardless of subsequent exposure to the behavioral instances, this does not seem to be the case for perceived dispersion. Content Analyses of Written Abstractions The coded content of the written abstractions showed results that were quite consistent with those that we have reported for participants’ group judgments. First, judges’ ratings of how much the abstractions conveyed stereotypic content varied significantly as a function of triad [F(2, 32) ⫽ 11.51, p ⬍ .001]; neither the condition main effect nor the condition ⫻ triad interaction were significant. Additionally, only the single degree-of-freedom comparison between the abstractions of the first triad and those of the second and third was significant. Mean coded values are provided in the top part of Table 4. Thus, as in the stereotypicality ratings, the written abstractions were more stereotypic for triad 2 and triad 3 participants, regardless of whether these participants also saw the individual instances. Examining judges’ ratings of the mention of variability information in the abstractions, we found a significant triad main effect, again entirely attributable to the difference between triad 1 and triads 2 and 3 [F(1, 16) ⫽ 5.94, p ⫽ .027], and a significant interaction between that contrast and condition [F(1, 16) ⫽ 11.17, p ⫽ .004]. Mean values for this coded variable are provided in the bottom of Table 4. As in the perceived dispersion ratings provided by participants, the written abstractions discussed within-group variability less in triads 2 and 3 than

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in triad 1, but only among those groups where triad 2 and triad 3 participants did not have access to the group instances. Surprisingly, there were no significant differences as a function of triad, condition, or their interaction in the number of individual behavioral instances mentioned in the abstractions. This was particularly surprising, since triad 2 and triad 3 participants in the abstraction-only condition did not see the instances, whereas all other participants did. The mean level of confirming instances across all participants mentioned in the written abstractions was 2.50. The mean level of mentions of disconfirming instances was 0.30. There was, however, a great deal of variability across participants in the mention of these instances and it is for this reason, we suspect, that none of the triad or condition differences proved significant. One interesting aspect concerning the mention of confirming and disconfirming instances is that a significantly larger proportion of confirming instances were mentioned than of disconfirming ones. Recall that each participant, in those conditions where they saw instances, encountered 36 confirming instances and 9 disconfirming ones. Converting the mean number of mentioned instances to proportions of those previously seen, a significantly larger proportion of the confirming instances (M ⫽ .069) than the disconfirming ones (M ⫽ .033) were mentioned [F(1, 16) ⫽ 8.26, p ⫽ .011]. This difference was found to be significant if we only looked at participants in the first triad [F(1,16) ⫽ 5.31, p ⫽ .035]. Thus, in the initial written abstractions provided by the first triad participants, disconfirming instances were relatively ignored. It seems reasonable that the content of the written abstractions should mediate the effects we found on the participants’ group stereotypes. Thus, one might suspect that the coded judgments of the triad 1 written abstractions should correlate both with the group perceptions that these triad 1 participants provided and with the group perceptions of participants who read these abstractions (i.e., triad 2 participants in the same group). Surprisingly, however, the coded judgments of the abstractions were not systematically related to any of the group perception measures. Part of the reason for the lack of significant correlations is certainly due to the fact that in each condition we only had nine groups and group was the unit of analysis for testing the significance of these correlations. However, it is worth pointing out that Gilovich (1987) in his analysis of first-hand versus second-hand person perceptions found no significant correlations between the coded content of the communications from the first-hand participants and the judgments provided by the second-hand participants. Stereotypic Consensus As Haslam et al. (1996) and others have suggested, one of the bases for the consensual nature of stereotypes is that they are not learned anew by each perceiver; rather, they are transmitted across generations. If this is the case, then we might expect greater agreement in perceptions of the central tendency of the group in later triads than in triad 1 participants, where each person could form individual impressions from the behavioral data. To examine this hypothesis, we

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computed intraclass correlations due to the six attitude items for each triad of participants and we compared these intraclass correlations across triads. These intraclass correlations essentially ask to what extent the three participants in each triad give similar patterns of responses across the six attitude items. They are equivalent to the pooled pairwise correlations between pairs of participants across items (Judd & McClelland, 1998). For each triad, intraclass correlations were computed for the percentage estimate responses and the means from the mean/range task and the histogram task. Thus, these estimate consensus about the perceived mean of the group on stereotypic and counterstereotypic items. Prior to analysis, these correlations were converted to Fisher Z statistics to decrease departures of their distribution from normality. 5 In the case of the percentage estimates, there was a significant increase in consensus between participants when we compare triad 1 participants to those in later trials [mean intraclass correlation in triad 1: .73; mean in triads 2 and 3: .82; F(1, 16) ⫽ 7.39, p ⬍ .05]. Triad differences for the other two measures were in the same direction, although not significant. Additionally, the triad difference was not moderated by condition. Within any group of nine participants, those who were in one of the later triads read the exact same written abstractions. That is, triad 2 participants in any group all read the same three descriptions written by the three triad 1 participants in that group. Similarly, all triad 3 participants read the same three abstract descriptions, i.e., those written by the three triad 2 participants in their group. Differences in consensus across triads may thus be due either to reading the exact same abstractions or to reading abstractions in general as opposed to forming a group impression based only on the behavioral instances. To examine this difference, we recomputed the intraclass correlations after having reshuffled participants across groups. We did this by forming new groups of nine participants such that any one participant in a triad in the new groups came from different original groups from the other two participants in his or her same triad. Thus, for instance, triad 1 participants in the new reshuffled group 1 were all triad 1 participants, but they came from original groups 1, 2, and 3. Likewise for triad 2 and triad 3 participants. As a result, in the new reshuffled groups, participants in triads 2 and 3 in any one group had actually read a different set of three abstract descriptions. Still, the difference in the magnitude of the intraclass correlation between triad 1 and triads 2 and 3 remained [F(1, 16) ⫽ 6.98, p ⬍ .05]. Thus, it seems that the increase in consensus due to stereotype formation based on exposure to secondhand group descriptions is found even when those group descriptions are not identical. 5

These correlations tell us about consensus in the perceived central tendency of the group. It is also possible to ask about consensus in the perceived dispersion of the group, computing intraclass correlations with the range and standard deviation measures. In general, consensus in dispersion was low and there were no signficiant differences by triad, condition, or their interaction.

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Memory for Behavioral Instances From the recall protocols of participants who saw the behavioral instances, we coded the proportion of behaviors recalled from each of the three trait domains that were either stereotype-consistent or stereotype-inconsistent. Using only the groups in the abstraction-plus-instance conditions, these recall proportions were analyzed as a function of triad and consistent versus inconsistent behaviors. The only significant effect that emerged from this analysis was a main effect of type of behavior [F(1, 8) ⫽ 7.60, p ⬍ .05], such that across triads there was somewhat better memory for stereotype-inconsistent behaviors (mean proportion recalled ⫽ 32.9) than for stereotype-consistent behaviors (mean proportion recalled ⫽ 26.8). There was no triad main effect nor did it interact with type of behavior. As in Park and Hastie (1987), this suggests that the impression differences we have documented across triads were not due to differential memory for the behavioral instances among participants in the later triads who first read the written abstractions and then encountered the instances. Discussion The results of this study demonstrate that group stereotypes that are learned through abstractions conveyed by others differ in a variety of ways from those that are formed through first-hand experience with group instances. Consistent with Park and Hastie (1987), we found that those who learned about the group through second-hand impressions perceived the group to be less dispersed than those who experienced the group instances first-hand. Additionally, by using group descriptions actually constructed by participants, we were able to show that second-hand group impressions are more extreme or stereotypic impressions, consistent with earlier work on the effects of communication (Allport & Postman, 1947; Gilovich, 1987; Grice, 1975). Finally, consistent with the speculations of Haslam et al. (1996), we found that there was somewhat greater agreement about the contents of the group impression among participants whose impressions were second-hand compared to those formed on the basis of exposure simply to the instance information. Interestingly the triad differences that we found occurred between the first triad and the subsequent two, without further differences as a function of communicating about the group between the second and third triads. This suggests that what is primarily driving the effects we have obtained is the instance-based versus abstraction-based difference that served as the original impetus for this research rather than subsequent communication effects between individuals who both have abstraction-based group stereotypes. Although we suspect that such further communication effects could be observed in a more lengthy series of rumor-transmission steps, beyond the third-level used in this study, it seems to us that the instance-based versus abstraction-based distinction is a more important determinant of group stereotypes than is the number of individuals through whom an abstraction-based stereotype has been received.

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The other interesting qualification to our conclusions is that while stereotypicality differences as a function of triad were found in both conditions, these differences emerged on perceived group dispersion only among groups where later triads did not also receive the instance information. We suspect that this difference is largely due to differences in the kinds of information that participants retrieve when thinking about group stereotypicality versus group dispersion. Stereotypicality judgments require the participant to think at the group level, to think about what the group is typically like. On the other hand dispersion judgments require participants to think about differences among group members, focusing more on the magnitude of the differences between individual group members. It is for this reason, we believe, that dispersion judgments are much more influenced by the specific instances that participants are exposed to, even in those conditions where their stereotypes are largely abstraction-based. When forced to think about individual differences, instances that one has encountered are used. When thinking about the group as a group, then abstraction-based stereotypes are more stereotypic, even in those cases where instances are also available. The general implication of our results is that stereotypes that are primarily abstraction-based differ in a variety of ways from those that are more instancebased. Abstraction-based group impressions are typically more extreme, they contain less information about group variability, and they are more likely to be agreed upon by others whose impressions were similarly formed. All of this suggests that such stereotypes ought to be more powerful in social perception and may be more resistant to disconfirmation and change. Although we believe that our work significantly extends the work of Park and Hastie (1987) through the use of abstractions that were actually generated by experimental participants, these abstractions were still composed and communicated in relatively sterile and atypical contexts. We suspect that stereotype transmission more typically occurs as informal verbal communications rather than as written group descriptions that are read by others. We were therefore interested in extending these results by examining the communication of group impressions in more realistic group discussion settings. This interest naturally led us to consider the broader issue of how group discussion and communication alter the contents of individual beliefs, regardless of whether we are talking about group impressions (e.g., Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969) or other sorts of beliefs and attitudes (e.g., Myers & Lamm, 1976). The abundant literature on group polarization (in addition to the two sources just cited, see Burnstein & Vinokur, 1973, 1977) certainly supports the conclusion that group discussion in situations where there is a group consensus in beliefs and attitudes alters those beliefs in ways that can be seen as similar to some of the results from our first study. Whether through social comparison processes that operate in group contexts when the group consists of like-minded individuals (Myers, 1978) or through novel arguments that may emerge during group discussion (Vinokur & Burnstein, 1974), attitudes and beliefs that emerge fol-

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lowing a group discussion are typically more extreme and more consensually held than those that were espoused prior to the discussion. Additionally, Brauer, Judd, and Gliner (1995) have recently shown that the very process of communicating one’s own attitude to a like-minded group of individuals may result in polarization. Suppose four individuals were brought together with the goal of discussing what a group is like. Two of these individuals have instance-based impressions of the group, formed through previous exposure to group instances. The other two do not. The role of the first two individuals in the group discussion is to convey their impressions of the group. The role of the latter two individuals is simply to form an impression of what the group under discussion is like. From the previous study, it seems reasonable to expect that those individuals who learn about the group from the abstractions communicated through the group discussion should come away with an impression of the group that is more stereotypical and less dispersed than individuals who learn about the group from exposure to the instance information only. Additionally, following Brauer et al. (1995), one might expect that the very process of communicating these stereotypes may alter them in similar ways. In other words, both those who learn about the group from the group discussion and those who communicate their impressions of the group through the group discussion may emerge with more stereotypic and less dispersed group impressions compared to individuals who simply form an impression based on the instance information but engage in no group discussion. A recent study by Harasty (1997) examined group discussions of gender stereotypes in dyads composed of either males or females who discussed both their in-group (same-gender) impressions or their out-group impressions. Although there were important differences in the content of those discussions according to whether they focused on the in-group versus the out-group (consistent with some of Park & Judd’s, 1990, results), Harasty found that the stereotypes were not influenced by the discussion itself. We suspect that this is largely due to the fact that these discussions focused on well-established group impressions and that such effects are much more likely to emerge in the case of impressions about groups to which participants have only recently been acquainted or to whom they become acquainted during the discussion itself. STUDY 2 Method Overview and Design Participants were run in groups of four. Groups were randomly assigned to either a discussion or no-discussion condition. In the discussion condition, two of the four participants learned about one hypothetical target group by reading behavioral instances supposedly taken from the group while the other two participants learned about a second target group in the same manner. They each then wrote summary impressions of the group they had learned about. Following

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this, all four participants came together with the goal of communicating their impression of the target group they encountered to the other two participants in the group. First one target group was discussed, then the second, with order randomly determined. In each case, the two participants who had earlier encountered the behavioral instances about that target group read the impressions they had each written, discussed any similarities or differences in those impressions, and then talked informally with the other two participants in order to convey their impressions more fully. 6 Then the process was reversed, with the second two participants reading their written impressions of the target group they had encountered and conducting a discussion to convey their impressions of this second group. All four participants then completed the dependent variables, providing stereotypicality and dispersion ratings for both target groups, with the order of group ratings randomized. Participants in the no-discussion condition first learned about one of the two target groups from the same behavioral instances as those used in the discussion condition. After writing an impression of the group, they then encountered the behavioral instances of the second target group and wrote an impression of this second group. Finally, these no-discussion participants completed the dependent measures for both groups. In sum, discussion versus no discussion varied between participant groups. In the discussion condition, which target group was learned about from instances and which one was learned about from discussion varied within participant groups. Additionally, the order in which the two target groups were discussed varied between participant groups as did the order in which the two target groups were rated on the dependent variables. In the no-discussion condition, all participants learned about both target groups from instances, but the order of exposure to this target group information varied between participants, as did the order in which the two target groups were rated. The rating order variable was not included in the analysis, once preliminary analyses revealed that it exerted no effects that qualify our conclusions. Additionally, the order of discussion of the two target groups in the discussion condition was not included in the analyses we report since preliminary analyses showed that it exerted no effects. Participants One hundred forty undergraduate students at the University of Colorado participated in Study 2 (19 groups in the discussion condition and 18 in the no-discussion condition) in partial fulfillment of an introductory course require6

Our goal in this study was to examine the effects of communicating group abstractions in real group discussions. It therefore might be surprising that we asked participants first to read the group impressions they had earlier written before the free discussion began. We did this because participants in several pilot groups, where the written descriptions were not first read, were not very motivated in conveying their target group impressions. Once we instructed them to first read aloud the impressions they had written down, the subsequent informal discussions were much more lively.

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ment. Participants were run in groups of four, which were randomly assigned to the discussion or no-discussion conditions. 7 Stimulus Materials Two target groups, again both hypothetical fraternities at the University of Iowa, were portrayed by providing some participants with 45 behavioral instances of each one. These stimulus materials were identical to those used in Study 1 for one of the two target groups. (See the Appendix.) Thus, for this fraternity, 15 instances provided information about the academic competence of group members, 15 conveyed information about their liberal political beliefs, and 15 documented their leadership skills. In each case, 12 were stereotype-consistent and 3 stereotype-inconsistent. The stimulus materials for the second target group were similar, although the relevant attribute dimensions were changed. The 45 behavioral instances provided for this group conveyed the impression that the group tended to be athletic, religious, and extroverted, again with 15 behavioral instances relevant to each attribute dimension, 12 stereotype-consistent and 3 stereotype-inconsistent. We deliberately chose different attribute dimensions for this second target group, since we wanted the two group impressions to be relatively independent of each other, hoping that participants would avoid simply contrasting and comparing the two target groups on the same attributes. Procedure Participants were run in groups of four and randomly assigned to the discussion or no-discussion condition. For groups in the discussion condition, two participants were randomly assigned to learn about one fraternity, the Sigma Alphas, via instances and two were randomly assigned to learn about a second, the Delta Betas, via instances. Similar to Study 1, participants were instructed that they should form an impression about a hypothetical fraternity by reading 45 behavioral instances that described actions performed by members of the fraternity. Participants were paced through these 45 behavioral instances, given 8 s to read each card, and then told to flip to the next one. After reading the behavioral instances, participants were asked to write a one-page description that summarized their impression of the fraternity. When all participants had completed the written descriptions for their target group, the experimenter informed the participants that two of them had learned about one group and two had learned about a different group. The experimenter then explained that the next part of the experiment would involve the participants communicating in a group discussion about the groups they had read encoun7

This random assignment was preserved except in the eight cases when only three participants showed up for an experimental session. In these cases the group of three participants was assigned to the no-discussion condition. As a result, in some no-discussion groups, only one participant learned about the two groups in one of the two orders.

COMMUNICATING SOCIAL STEREOTYPES

589

tered, with the goal of informing each other about the group each one had read about. The participants were then seated around a table, with the two who learned about Sigma Alpha on one side and the two who learned about Delta Beta on the other side. Participants were instructed that they should communicate an accurate and complete description of the group they had learned about to the two uninformed participants. The group discussion began with the two participants who learned about one target group via behavioral instances (with the group order chosen at random) each reading their written descriptions out loud and then discussing with each other any similarities or differences they noted in their impression. The discussion then became much more open, with all four participants discussing what the target group was like. “Receivers” typically addressed questions to the “communicators” about their impressions and these were clarified through the discussion that ensued. After the two receivers felt like they had sufficient knowledge about this “new” group, the process then reversed, with the two previous receivers switching roles to be communicators and reading their written descriptions out loud, discussing any similarities or differences they noted in their impression, and engaging in a group discussion of this target group. Following these group discussions, dependent measures on both target groups were completed, with the order of the two groups varying between participants. Groups in the no-discussion condition also learned about both target groups, but only from the behavioral instance information (identical to the instances used for the discussion condition). For groups in the no-discussion condition, the initial procedure was identical to the discussion condition. Participants were instructed that they would form an impression of a hypothetical fraternity by reading 45 behavioral instances that described actions performed by members of the fraternity. Participants were paced through the cards and then asked to write a one-page description of the target group. After all participants had completed their written descriptions, they were instructed that they would now learn about a second target group using 45 new cards (the order of the target group learned first, Sigma Alpha vs Delta Beta, was counterbalanced within group). Participants were paced through this second set of cards and asked to write a one-page description of this second target group. At this point, the no-discussion participants were told that they would participate in a group discussion of the two groups they had learned about, but prior to this we wanted to ask them some questions about those groups. Participants then completed dependent measures assessing perceptions of stereotypicality and variability for both target groups, with order of target group judgments counterbalanced within groups as in the discussion condition. These participants were then debriefed and dismissed without any discussion actually taking place. Dependent Measures As in Study 1, the percentage estimate, mean/range, and histogram tasks were used to assess perceptions of target group stereotypicality and dispersion. For each of the three attribute dimensions that were stereotypic of each group (i.e.,

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academic competent, politically liberal, and demonstrating leadership for one target group; athletic, religious, and extroverted for the other), one stereotypic and one counterstereotypic attitude statement was presented to participants and they were asked to indicate (1) the percentage of the group that would agree with the statement, (2) the mean and range of agreement on a 20-point rating scale, and (3) the group frequency distribution. Participants judged each group only on those six attitude statements that were relevant to that particular target group. Thus, for instance, participants did not judge the target group that was presented as athletic, religious, and extroverted on attitude statements assessing academic competence. In addition to the group judgments on these attitude statements, we also asked participants to complete the percentage task, the mean/range task, and the histogram task directly on the three traits that were stereotypic of each group (i.e., academic competent, politically liberal, and demonstrating leadership for one target group; athletic, religious, and extroverted for the other). These trait ratings were included in addition to the attitude statements simply to provide additional assessments of the group stereotypes. Results We first present the perceived stereotypicality results from each of the three judgment tasks, then the perceived dispersion results, and then those pertaining to group consensus. No memory data were collected in this study nor were the actual group discussions coded. Participant groups were treated as the unit of analysis, with discussion versus no-discussion condition varying between groups. Within groups, the primary independent variable was whether the group was learned first versus second. In the discussion condition, this factor was equivalent to whether the group was learned about from the behavioral instances and subsequently presented or whether the group was learned about only through the group discussion. As described previously, the specific group that was encountered first (the Sigma Alphas versus the Delta Betas) was counterbalanced within groups. Perceived Group Stereotypicality Perceived stereotypicality is assessed from the percentage estimate task, the mean from the mean/range task, and the mean from the histogram task. In this study, ratings on all three tasks were completed both on stereotypic and counterstereotypic attitudes statements (as in Study 1) and also on the individual stereotypic traits. In the case of the attitude statements, whether an item was stereotypic of the target group or counterstereotypic was included as an additional within-group factor. Means for all of the following effects are reported in Table 5. On all three tasks, there was a large main effect of item stereotypicality for the attitude statements, with higher judgments given to the stereotypic statements than to the counterstereotypic ones [Percent F(1, 35) ⫽ 1177.33, p ⬍ .0001;

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TABLE 5 Perceived Stereotypicality of Target Groups (Study 2) Condition

Discussion

No discussion

Stereotypic Counterstereotypic

80.87 17.24 82.47

67.70 22.61 67.48

Stereotypic Counterstereotypic

15.25 5.31 15.17

13.86 6.18 13.71

Stereotypic Counterstereotypic

3.90 2.20 3.92

3.74 2.44 3.71

Percentage estimates Attitude statements

Traits Mean of mean/range Attitude statements

Traits Mean of histogram Attitude statements

Traits

Mean/Range F(1, 35) ⫽ 749.97, p ⬍ .0001; Histogram F(1, 35) ⫽ 672.51, p ⬍ .0001]. Importantly, these effects were qualified in all cases by condition, such that the target groups were judged more stereotypically on the attitude statements in the discussion condition than in the no-discussion condition [Percent F(1, 35) ⫽ 34.27, p ⬍ .0001; Mean/Range F ⫽ 12.34, p ⫽ .0012; Histogram F ⫽ 14.17, p ⫽ .0006]. However, there was no evidence that this condition difference was further qualified by order of learning [Percent F(1, 35) ⫽ 0.36, p ⫽ .55; Mean/Range F(1, 35) ⫽ 0.03, p ⫽ .86; Histogram F(1, 35) ⫽ 2.22, p ⫽ .15], suggesting that greater perceived stereotypicality in the discussion condition was found both when the target group was learned from instances and then presented in the discussion and when the target group was only learned about from the group discussion. Similar effects were found for ratings of the three trait dimensions on all three tasks, although here only stereotypic traits were rated. Higher trait ratings were given on all three tasks by participants in the discussion condition than by those in the no-discussion condition [Percent F(1, 35) ⫽ 38.19, p ⬍ .0001; Mean/ Range F(1, 35) ⫽ 20.16, p ⬍ .0001; Histogram F(1, 35) ⫽ 11.60, p ⫽ .0017.]. And on none of the tasks was this discussion difference qualified by order of learning. In other words, both target groups were judged more stereotypically on these trait dimensions in the discussion condition than in the no-discussion condition, regardless of whether the target group was learned from instances and then presented in the group discussion or only learned through the group discussion.

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THOMPSON, JUDD, AND PARK TABLE 6 Perceived Dispersion of Target Groups, Study 2 Discussion

Attitude statements Range SD Traits Range SD

1st target group (learned from instances)

2nd target group (learned from discussion only)

1st target group

2nd target group

9.57 1.05

8.45 1.02

12.64 1.11

12.72 1.12

10.61 1.08

9.22 1.01

13.76 1.10

14.05 1.12

No discussion

Perceived Group Dispersion For both attitude statements and traits, we have two measures of group dispersion: the range from the mean and range task and the standard deviation computed from the histogram task. Means on both tasks, for both attitude statements and traits, relevant to the following results are presented in Table 6. For both measures, when rating the attitude statements, there was a significant difference between the perceived dispersion of the target groups as a function of discussion versus no discussion [Range F(1, 35) ⫽ 33.41, p ⬍ .0001; SD F(1, 35) ⫽ 4.48, p ⫽ .0416], with the target groups seen as less dispersed or variable among discussion participant groups than among groups who did not discuss. There was evidence, however, on the Range task that this discussion main effect was qualified by an interaction with order of learning [Range F(1, 35) ⫽ 8.22, p ⫽ .007; SD F(1, 35) ⫽ 1.40, p ⫽ .2449]. Inspection of the means suggests that group discussion led to less dispersion for both target groups, but this difference was especially pronounced in the case of the target group learned about only through the discussion. The analysis of perceived dispersion from the trait judgments yielded similar results. Here, there was a main effect due to discussion in the case of the range [F(1, 35) ⫽ 41.22, p ⬍ .0001], although it was not significant in the case of the standard deviation measure [F(1, 35) ⫽ 2.43, p ⫽ .1283]. The interaction between condition and order of target group was significant for both dispersion measures [Range F(1, 35) ⫽ 10.00, p ⫽ .0032; SD F(1, 35) ⫽ 6.47, p ⫽ .0155]. Inspection of the cell means for both measures again leads to the conclusion that group discussion led to less perceived dispersion of the target groups, although this effect was somewhat stronger in the case of the target group learned about only through group discussion than in the case of the target group learned about from the instance information and then presented during the group discussion.

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Stereotypic Consensus In each group of four participants in the discussion condition, two learned about a given target group from the instances and then presented the target group to the discussion group, and two participants learned about a target group only from the group discussion. To examine consensus, rather than computing the intraclass correlation across all four participants as we did in Study 1, we computed the simple correlation between pairs of participants who encountered the particular target group that was being rated in the same order. Thus, for each participant group, we have four different correlations, two for each specific target group between pairs of participants who encountered that target group first (via instances in the discussion condition) and between pairs of participants who encountered that target group second (only via the discussion in the discussion condition). We computed these correlations across the responses given to the six attitude statements, once for the percentage estimates, once for the mean from the mean/range task, and once for the means from the histogram task. 8 These correlations were transformed to Fisher Z scores and then analyzed as a function of condition (between-participant groups) and order of target group (within-participant groups). For all three sets of correlations, those from the percentage estimates, those from the mean of the mean/range task, and those from the mean of the histogram task, the only significant effects that emerged were main effects due to discussion condition [all three F’s(1, 28) ⬎ 5.22, p’s ⬍ .05]. Collapsing across all three tasks, the mean correlation between participants in their judged impressions of the target groups was .82 in the discussion condition and .66 in the no-discussion condition. In other words, discussion of the target groups led to an increase in consensus about the content of the stereotypes of the target groups, and this difference did not depend on whether a specific target group was learned about through instances and then discussed or whether it was simply learned about through the group discussion. GENERAL DISCUSSION The results we have reported are quite consistent and the theoretical story they have to tell is relatively straightforward. Group impressions formed through exposure to others’ abstract impressions differ in a variety of ways from impressions formed through first-hand exposure to behavioral instances. First, impressions of target groups that are abstraction-based are more extreme or stereotypic than are impressions that are instance-based. This difference does not seem to be moderated when participants whose stereotypes are abstraction-based are subse8

Only two of these four correlations could be computed for participant groups in the no-discussion condition where only three participants showed up. As a result, not all participant groups are included in the analyses that we report, although the means correlations when all computed correlations are included are virtually identical to those on which the analyses were conducted.

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quently exposed to the behavioral instances. Second, impressions of target groups that are abstraction-based are less dispersed than instance-based impressions, although here the difference seems to be reduced if the abstraction-based participants are subsequently exposed to the behavioral instances. Third, there is more consensus in group impressions when those impressions are learned from abstractions than from first-hand exposure to behavioral instances. Fourth, discussions among perceivers about target group impressions have consequences for those impressions that are very similar to the abstraction-based versus instancebased differences just summarized. Both those who learn about a target group from instances and then describe what the group is like in a group discussion and those who form an impression of that target group only from the discussion come away with a more extreme or stereotypic impression of the target group than perceivers who are simply exposed to the behavioral instances. Additionally, group discussion of target group impressions seems to lead to a reduction in the perceived dispersion of the target groups, but this difference is moderated by previous exposure to the behavioral instances. Those participants whose impressions are formed based solely on the group discussion have a less dispersed view of the target group than those who formed their impressions based on the behavioral instances and then presented their impressions to others in the group discussion. Finally, group discussion of target group impressions increases social consensus. Nearly all of these effects can be fit within a theoretical framework that focuses on the consequences of communication both for the communicator and for the recipient of the communication. Our first study, consistent with Gilovich’s work in the person perception domain, shows that group stereotypes that are learned from abstractions communicated from others are importantly different from group stereotypes that are based on first-hand instance information. The difference here is best understood as a function of communication per se rather than as a function of rumor transmission across a series of communicators, since differences between triads 2 and 3, both of which were presented with abstractions, proved not to be significant. Additionally, when participants who received the communicated abstractions were subsequently exposed to the original behavioral instances, only differences in perceived stereotypicality remained significant, with those subsequently encountered instances seemingly mitigating the effects of communication on the perceived dispersion of the group. For these abstraction-plus-instance participants the persistence of the stereotypicality effect is particularly interesting, since these triad 2 and triad 3 participants actually had more information about the group than did the triad 1 participants, contrary to what would typically happen in the transmission of rumors, where there is information loss across the sequential levels of transmission. When considering the participants in the abstraction-only condition, it might be tempting to attribute differences in how the group is perceived to differences in the sheer amount of information available to triad 1 versus triad 2 and triad 3 participants, with more stereotypic perceptions being a function of simply less

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information about the group. However, the fact that the abstraction-plus-instance participants also saw the group more stereotypically suggests that the difference is due to abstraction-based learning about the group rather than to the amount of information received. Our preferred explanation for why the abstraction-plus-instances participants did not show a significant difference in perceived group dispersion as a function of triad is that dispersion judgments involve the retrieval of instance information if such exists, whereas stereotypicality judgments do not. Thus, we think that the failure to find dispersion differences in these abstraction-plus-instance participants is not simply due to their having more information about the group than abstraction-only participants. Rather it is due the fact that the information they did have in addition is of a particular kind; it is instance-based information that could be retrieved at the time when dispersion judgments were required. The results of the second study elaborate on those of the first by suggesting that actual face-to-face, rather than simply written, communications have similar effects to those documented in Study 1. Those who receive communications from others in group discussions come away with more extreme and less dispersed views of the target group in question. Additionally and importantly, the process of communicating about a group in a group discussion format also causes the communicator to perceive the target group more stereotypically. This conclusion is also a significant extension of what we can conclude from the first study in that the very process of face-to-face communication leads to perceptual differences of the target group under discussion. We believe that our conclusions have important theoretical implications for the ways in which stereotypes are conceptualized. Stereotypes can be defined as beliefs about the typical attributes of groups, containing information not only about these attributes but also about the degree to which these attributes are widely shared in the target group. According to this definition, as we have previously discussed (Judd & Park, 1993), stereotypes need not be stereotypic exaggerations of what a group is like (although they typically are); they need not be overgeneralizations about the prevalence of stereotypic attributes in the group (although they typically are); and finally, they need not be socially shared (although they typically are). The social communication of stereotypes, as we have documented in this research, necessitates the three qualifications contained in parentheses in the previous sentence, i.e., the three “although they typically are.” Through the process of social communication, group impressions are stereotypically exaggerated. Through the process of social communication, groups are seen as less variable and stereotypic attributes are seen as more prevalent. And finally, through the process of social communication, group stereotypes become consensually shared. Although social perceivers might reasonably be expected to form more or less veridical group impressions based on first-hand exposure to members of those groups, it is the process of social communication that is in large part responsible, we believe, for the inaccuracies

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that are typically associated with stereotypes. Social stereotypes are socially constructed. They are talked about, they are passed on from generation to generation, and they are reinforced by communication with like-minded others. These processes fundamentally alter group impressions and they do so in ways that lead to some of the deleterious consequences of stereotype application. Finally, there is an interesting parallel to our work that is worth commenting upon. Park (1986) and Sherman (1996) have written about how the representation of impressions of both individuals and groups change as one acquires greater experience with the objects of those impressions. In general, these authors have shown that representations of both individual social targets and groups are likely to be initially based on particular concrete instances and behaviors that one has encountered. Over time, however, with greater experience and greater depth of knowledge, more abstract characterizations of the objects are formed and stored. Within individual perceivers, there seems to be an evolution from the specific to the more abstract in the representations that are retained about the social world. Our research suggests that the same kind of evolution occurs in knowledge representation and impressions as they are passed along from one person to another. Knowledge acquisition and the development of impressions involve a process of moving from the specific to the more abstract, both within a person and as a function of communication between people. And this process carries with it implications about how the content of the impressions is altered. Interestingly, this perspective suggests a slightly different take on the evolution of impressions in individual perceivers. Impression development might be seen, in light of our results, as the process of repeatedly communicating with oneself about the impressions one has formed of the social world.

APPENDIX Study 1: Behavioral Instances Academic Competence Dimension Stereotype-confirming instances 1. Brad D. decides to study Saturday night because of tests he has the following week. 2. Jim C. has one of the highest GPA’s of all students majoring in Chemistry. 3. Wes F. was just admitted to the honors major program in History. 4. When John C. was a junior he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. 5. Whit L. spends the weekend preparing for the oral defense of his senior honors thesis. 6. Keith K. gets an “A” on his paper analyzing the symbolism in Moby Dick. 7. Lee W. writes a computer program that wins a prize in the engineering school. 8. Jason W. completes his applications for medical school over Thanksgiving break. 9. Carl S. is admitted to a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. 10. Mike J. is offered a summer internship with a local law firm. 11. Sean C. receives an “A-” on his organic chemistry test. 12. Chad P. reads Camus’ The Stranger in the original French.

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APPENDIX—Continued Academic Competence Dimension Stereotype-disconfirming instances 13. Steve H. skips his statistics class because he did not get the assignment done. 14. Mitch C. gets a “C-” on a paper for 19th Century American Lit. 15. Brian P. decides to drop two of his classes during his junior year because he isn’t much interested in them. Politically Liberal Dimension Stereotype-confirming instances 1. Colin S. spends his summer coordinating volunteers doing fundraising for Greenpeace. 2. Phil W. attends meetings of the local chapter of the Sierra Club. 3. Cooper B. sends a letter to his Congressman opposing cuts in welfare programs. 4. Greg F. applies for a summer internship in Washington working for the Democratic senator from his state. 5. Nick S. participates in a Pro-Choice rally organized in town by the National Organization for Women. 6. Francis K. campaigns for candidate running for city council from the Socialist party. 7. Aaron C. refuses to buy Coors beer because of the conservative politics of the Coors family. 8. Adam T. strongly argues for curbs on handguns in a class discussion concerning the Bill of Rights. 9. Cody L. attends a rally of the Rainbow Coalition when Jesse Jackson visits the campus. 10. Jordon M. put a Clinton/Gore bumper sticker on his car during the last presidential election campaign. 11. Dave N. signs a petition criticizing the University Board of Regents when they refuse to extend employee benefits to homosexual couples. 12. Robert G. writes a letter to the newspaper editor complaining the absence of minority faculty on campus. Stereotype-disconfirming instances 13. Dan V. writes an economics paper supporting free-market capitalism. 14. Andy O. supports the current Republican efforts to reduce the size of the federal government. 15. Ben L. refuses to buy a Japanese car because he thinks we ought to support our own industries. Leadership Dimension Stereotype-confirming instances 1. Rich T. receives the President’s Award for campus leadership. 2. Bill R. helped to set up and now coordinates the University’s recycling program in the dormitories. 3. Jay H. was just elected the editor of the campus newspaper. 4. James L. helps to organize a weekend walk-a-thon to raise support for the local AIDS project. 5. Matt B. campaigns hard for class president but ultimately loses the election. 6. Scott D. organizes a program to get undergraduates involved in faculty research in his major. 7. Jeff M. coordinates a volunteer program at a homeless shelter in town. 8. Chris F. organizes a visit by Allen Ginsberg to the campus.

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APPENDIX—Continued Leadership Dimension 9. Kevin B. is a member of the Interfraternity Council. 10. Alex C. spends the weekend working on a voter registration drive downtown. 11. Josh S. helps organize this year’s Diversity Day activities on campus. 12. Jesse D. serves as a peer advisor one afternoon a week in the Dean’s office. Stereotype-disconfirming instances 13. Evan A. is a nervous wreck the night before he has to give an oral presentation in his marketing class. 14. Corey Z. turns down promotion to manager of the campus pub because he thinks it will involve too much work 15. Paul I. decides not to be Fraternity secretary because he doesn’t want to be in the limelight.

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