Chapter 18. Stereotypes and Person Perception:
Can Judging Individuals on the Basis of Stereotypes Increase Accuracy?

Abstract

    This chapter examines the role of stereotypes in enhancing or reducing the accuracy of person perception. It points out that: 1) relying on an inaccurate stereotype will usually reduce accuracy of person perception and that 2) this may help explain why many social scientists seem to assume that any influence of a stereotype on person perception is something bad and biased that leads people astray.  However, as Chapter 17 showed, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest effects in social psychology.  This raises the question: Will relying on accurate stereotypes enhance or reduce the accuracy of person perception?  This chapter’s answer is: It depends.  The chapter identifies three different situations on which the answer depends: 1) When people have vividly clear, credible, relevant individuating information, they usually (though not always) should rely on it and ignore their stereotypes; 2) When people have ambiguous or only partially informative individuating information, they should rely on both their (accurate) stereotype and the individuating information; and 3) When people have no individuating information, relying on their (accurate) stereotype will maximize the accuracy of their person perception predictions.  The scientific evidence is then reviewed, and, perhaps shockingly, it shows that how people integrate stereotypes and individuating information to arrive at person perception judgments approximately corresponds to what they should do to be as rational and accurate as possible.  The chapter ends by introducing the Stereotype Rationality Hypothesis, which suggests that lay people largely (though not perfectly) rely on stereotypes when doing so is most likely to lead to accurate predictions and inferences, and they readily prefer relevant individuating information when it is most likely to lead to accurate predictions and inferences.

EXCERPTS:
The prior three chapters: 1. Concluded that it was unjustified and counterproductive to define stereotypes as inaccurate; and 2. Reviewed dozens of studies demonstrating moderate to high accuracy in stereotypes.  This chapter addresses a different question.  Does relying on a stereotype when judging an individual person necessarily reduce the accuracy of that judgment?
Like most of the issues addressed in these chapters on stereotypes, the answers may seem obvious.  Is it not true that we should judge individuals entirely on their individual merits? Is it not true that we should never allowing our stereotypes to influence, bias, or color our judgments regarding individuals?  Isn’t relying on stereotypes the type of thing that only a racist or sexist would do?
In fact, I do not think the answers to questions like these are obvious at all, at least not if one spends some time and effort to think through these issues and examine the empirical evidence.  Let’s start with some concrete examples.
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Brodt & Ross, 1998.   The utility of an accurate stereotype was also demonstrated by Brodt and Ross (1998). College students made predictions about the behaviors and preferences of other college students who lived in one of two dormitories (one which had a campus reputation as a “preppie” dorm, the other as a “hippie” dorm). The students in the preppie dorm were widely seen as politically conservative, wealthy, and conventional. The students in the hippie dorm were widely seen as politically leftwing with unconventional practices and preferences.  Perceivers (other students who did not live in either dorm) viewed photographs of individual targets, were informed of each target’s dorm, and then made predictions about each target’s behaviors and attitudes (for example, do they prefer eating at a vegetarian restaurant or a hamburger joint).  Perceivers’ predictions were then compared to the targets’ self-reports on these same preferences and attitudes.
So, how accurate were people’s predictions?  Their accuracy depended on whether they relied on or ignored their stereotypes.  When perceivers predicted targets to be consistent with their dorm (for a preppie dorm resident to have preppie attributes or for a hippie dorm resident to have hippie attributes), 66% of their predictions were correct (they matched the targets’ self reports). When perceivers jettisoned their dorm stereotypes, and predicted targets to be inconsistent with their dorm, 43% of their predictions were correct. Relying on the preppie/hippie dorm stereotypes enhanced the accuracy of person perception predictions. Although they did not report results concerning the accuracy of perceived group differences, it is clear that relying on the stereotype increased the accuracy with which people perceived individuals.
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The prior chapter ended by summarizing the tactical retreat commonly taken by those wishing to acknowledge the existence, yet dismiss the importance of, the evidence on stereotype accuracy: “Yes, but what is really important about stereotypes is how they lead to biased judgments regarding individuals.”  Fortunately (for real people, if not for the psychologists emphasizing the power of stereotypes), the evidence overwhelmingly shows that stereotypes do not lead to very large biases in person perception.  Stereotypes biasing person perception is one of the smallest effects in all of social psychology; reliance on individuating information is one of the largest effects in all of social psychology; useful individuating information typically eliminates stereotyping and nearly always reduces it by a great deal; even ambiguous or useless information sometimes reduces stereotyping.