Stereotypes and Social Judgment: The Effects of Typicality and Group Heterogeneity

Two experiments showed that when subjects believed a group to be heterogeneous, they based their liking for a particular group member on their liking for the group as a whole, independently of and in addition to the target's behavior, and regardless of the target's typicality. When they believed the group to be homogeneous, however, they treated the target's typicality as a favorable or unfavorable attribute, which affected their evaluation. The latter subjects used their group stereotype as a standard of comparison in judging the implications of the target's behavior for a trait to which it was relevant. All subjects' stereotypes had a positive influence on judgments of stereotype-related traits for which the target's behavior was uninformative. A conceptualization is proposed to account for these findings.