All people share knowledge of cultural stereotypes of social groups—but what are the origins of these stereotypes? We examined whether stereotypes form spontaneously as information is repeatedly passed from person to person. As information about novel social targets was passed down a chain of individuals, what initially began as a set of random associations evolved into a system that was simplified and categorically structured. Over time, novel stereotypes emerged that not only were increasingly learnable but also allowed generalizations to be made about previously unseen social targets. By illuminating how cognitive and social factors influence how stereotypes form and change, these findings show how stereotypes might naturally evolve or be manipulated.
AllportG. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
2.
BarghJ. A.ChenM.BurrowsL. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230–244. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.71.2.230
3.
BartlettF. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
4.
BrewerM. B. (1988). A dual process model of impression formation. In WyerR. S. J.SrullT. K. (Eds.), Advances in social cognition (pp. 1–36). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5
5.
CunninghamS. J.MacraeC. N. (2011). The color of gender stereotyping. British Journal of Psychology, 102, 598–614. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02023.x
6.
DevineP. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5–18. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5
7.
DijksterhuisA.van KnippenbergA. (1998). The relation between perception and behavior, or how to win a game of Trivial Pursuit. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 865–877. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.865
8.
FiskeS. T. (1998). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. In GilbertT.FiskeS. T. (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (4th ed., pp. 357–411). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
9.
FiskeS. T.NeubergS. L. (1990). A continuum model of impression formation from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In ZannaM. P. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 1–74). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
10.
FiskeS. T.TaylorS. E. (1991). Social cognition (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
11.
GriffithsT. L.KalishM. L.LewandowskyS. (2008). Theoretical and empirical evidence for the impact of inductive biases on cultural evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363, 3503–3514. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0146
12.
GriffithsT. L.LewandowskyS.KalishM. L. (2013). The effects of cultural transmission are modulated by the amount of information transmitted. Cognitive Science, 37, 953–967. doi:10.1111/cogs.12045
13.
JuddC. M.ParkB. (1993). Definition and assessment of accuracy in social stereotypes. Psychological Review, 100, 109–128. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.1.109
14.
KirbyS.CornishH.SmithK. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 105, 10681–10686. doi:10.1073/pnas.0707835105
15.
LaPiereR. T. (1936). Type-rationalizations of group antipathy. Social Forces, 15, 232–237. doi:10.2307/2570963
16.
LyonsA.KashimaY. (2003). How are stereotypes maintained through communication? The influence of stereotype sharedness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 989–1005. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.989
17.
MacraeC. N.BodenhausenG. V. (2000). Social cognition: Thinking categorically about others. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 93–120. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.93
18.
MadonS.GuyllM.AboufadelK.MontielE.SmithA.PalumboP.JussimL. (2001). Ethnic and national stereotypes: The Princeton trilogy revisited and revised. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 996–1010. doi:10.1177/0146167201278007
19.
MadonS.JussimL.KeiperS.EcclesJ.SmithA.PalumboP. (1998). The accuracy and power of sex, social class, and ethnic stereotypes: A naturalistic study in person perception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 1304–1318. doi:10.1177/01461672982412005
20.
MedinD. L.SmithE. E. (1981). Strategies and classification learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 7, 241–253. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.7.4.241
21.
MesoudiA. (2009). How cultural evolutionary theory can inform social psychology, and vice versa. Psychological Review, 116, 929–952. doi:10.1037/0017062
22.
MesoudiA. (2011). Cultural evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
23.
RoedigerH. L.McDermottK. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803–814. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
24.
SchacterD. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54, 182–203. doi:10.1037//0003-066X.54.3.182
25.
ShepardR. N.HovlandC. I.JenkinsH. M. (1961). Learning and memorization of classifications. Psychological Monographs, 75(13), 1–42.
26.
ShermanJ. W.BessenoffG. R. (1999). Stereotypes as source-monitoring cues: On the interaction between episodic and semantic memory. Psychological Science, 10, 106–110. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00116
27.
SpiroR. J. (1980). Accommodative reconstruction in prose recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 84–95. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(80)90548-4
28.
StangorC.McMillanD. (1992). Memory for expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information: A review of the social and social developmental literatures. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 42–61. doi:10.1037//0033-2909.111.1.42
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
