Supplemental Materials for:

Stereotype (In)Accuracy in Perceptions of Group and Individuals (in press, Current Directions in Psychological Science)
Lee Jussim, Jarret Crawford, & Rachel Rubinstein

A shorter version of the following table appears in the manuscript.  Material that DOES NOT APPEAR in the manuscript
appears here in boldface type.  Due to my limited proficiency with html, table entries that appear as checkmarks in the manuscript table appear here as x marks.

TABLE 1

 

	Explicitly acknowledges strong evidence of stereotype accuracy	Reviews little or no evidence of accuracy and either dismisses accuracy as unimportant or emphasizes stereotype inaccuracy and bias	Defines/declares stereotypes to be inaccurate	Representative Quotes:
Scholarly Books
Banaji & Greenwald, 2013, Blindspot: The hidden biases of good people		x		P. 74: Because all stereotypes are partly true and partly false, it may seem pointless to debate their accuracy. P. 89:  … stereotyping is an unfortunate by-product of the otherwise immensely useful human ability to conceive the world in terms of categories. P. 93: But when stereotypes are unfavorable, as many are, the forces that cause people to act in ways that conform to the stereotype applied to their own group can have damaging effects.
Brown, 2011: Prejudice: Its social psychology		x		p. 71: … the question of whether stereotypes are ‘objectively’ (in)accurate is only of marginal interest to most students of prejudice. p. 105: A useful way of viewing stereotypes is as hypotheses in search of confirmatory information. Much evidence exists for this confirmation-seeking nature of stereotypic expectancies
Fiske & Taylor, 2008, Social cognition: From brains to culture		x		P. 257: Casual forms of bias are everywhere… in the long run, everyday bias taxes the physical and mental well-being of targets.  P. 282: Stereotyping is the cognitive aspect of bias … and it comes in both blatant and subtle forms.
Whitley & Kite, 2009, The psychology of prejudice and discrimination		x		P. 100: To fully understand the complexities of assessing stereotype accuracy, researchers must appreciate the risk of concluding that stereotypes do represent reality. Recall, again from Chapter 1, that stereotypes have been used as justification for maintaining the social status quo. Whites justified their subjugation of racial minority groups, for example, using the belief that minorities were naturally inferior to Whites and that such treatment was therefore appropriate (Duckitt, 1994). It may seem hard to believe now, but that perception was deemed accurate at the time… When stereotypes are influenced by societal norms or historical events, the proposition that they might be “accurate” becomes more difficult to support. At the group level, then, stereotypes may have a kernel of truth, but relying on them at the individual level may lead to serious judgment errors

 

Table 1, Continued

	Explicitly acknowledges strong evidence of stereotype accuracy	Cites little or no evidence of accuracy, dismisses accuracy as unimportant and/or emphasizes stereotype inaccuracy or bias	Defines/declares stereotypes to be inaccurate	Representative Quotes:
Textbooks
Aronson, 2011, The social animal			x	P. 309: To stereotype is to allow those pictures to dominate our thinking, leading us to assign identical characteristics to any person in a group, regardless of the actual variation among members of that group
Baumeister & Bushman, 2014, Social psychology and human nature	x			P. 485: The high level of accuracy in modern stereotypes may also indicate that stereotyping has changed.
Crisp & Turner, 2014, Essential social psychology			x	P. 57: Once a category is activated we tend to see members as possessing all the traits associated with the stereotype.
Greenberg, Schmader, Arndt, & Landau, 2015, Social psychology: The science of everyday life			x	p. 352: Even though this kernel [of truth] might be quite small, with much more overlap between groups than there are differences, as perceivers we tend to exaggerate any differences that might exist and apply them to all members of the group.
Grison, Heatherton, & Gazzaniga, 2015.  Psychology in your life	x			P. 385: Indeed, some stereotypes are based in truth: Men tend to be more violent than women, and women tend to be more nurturing than men. However, these statements are true on average.
King, 2013, Experiencing psychology			x	p. 402: A stereotype is a generalization about a group’s characteristics that does not consider any variations from one individual to another.
Schachter, Gilbert, Wegner, & Nock, 2015, Introducing psychology		x		P. 403: … stereotyping is a useful process that often produces harmful results, and it does so because stereotypes have four properties: They can be (1) inaccurate, (2) overused, (3) self-perpetuating, and (4) unconscious and automatic

Other Interesting Information (not in the paper)
There have been five major reviews of stereotype accuracy (Judd & Park, 1993; Jussim, 2012; Jussim et al, 2009; Lee, Jussim, & McCauley, 1995; Ryan, 2002, not counting our Handbook chapter that is in press). With respect to the four major scholarly books on stereotypes and social cognition (the top part of the table), it is interesting to ask, “How many of these reviews are cited in each scholarly book?”  The answers are:

Banaji & Greenwald (2013): Zero.
Brown (2011): Three (realistically, this is probably the most Brown could have cited; the book was probably just about in press as our 2009 paper was coming out).

Fiske & Taylor (2008): Zero.
Whitley & Kite (2009): Three (again, this is probably the most they could have cited, given the  publication dates of the later reviews).

Put differently, two of these four major sources grapple with at least some of the scholarship on stereotype accuracy, but two do not cite a single paper on stereotype accuracy.  The word “accuracy” does not appear in the index of Social Cognition, a striking omission for a source that describes social cognition as “The field concerns how people make sense of other people and themselves” (p. 14). 

References to the sources in the above table:

Aronson, E. (2011). The social animal (11^th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.

Banaji, M. R. & Greenwald, A. G. (2013). Blindspot: The hidden biases of good people. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.

Baumeister, R. F., & Bushman, B. J. (2014). Social psychology and human nature (3^rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Brown, R. (2010). Prejudice: Its social psychology (2^nd ed.). West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Crisp, R. J., & Turner, R. N. (2014). Essential social psychology (3rd ed.). London: Sage Publications.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2008). Social cognition: From brains to culture. McGraw-Hill.

Greenberg, J., Schmader, T., Arndt, J., & Landau, M. (2015). Social psychology: The science of everyday life. New York: Worth Publishers.

Grison, S., Heatherton, T. F., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2015). Psychology in your life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

King, L. A. (2013). Experience psychology (2^nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schacter, D. L., Gilbert, D. T., Wegner, D. M., & Nock, M. K. (2015). Introducing psychology (3^rd ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.

Whitley, B. & Kite, M. (2009). The psychology of prejudice and discrimination. Cengage Learning, Inc.

Additional Material that does not appear in the paper.
I find the claim (as per Brown and others) that social psychologists do not consider accuracy interesting or important … interesting and important.
First, consider these:

“However, a great deal of the thrust of stereotyping research has been to demonstrate that these behavioral expectancies are overgeneralized and inaccurate predictors of actual behavior of the target individual (Darley & Fazio, 1980, p. 870).

 

“The term stereotype refers to those interpersonal beliefs and expectancies that are both widely shared and generally invalid” (Miller & Turnbull, 1986, p. 233).

 

“The large literature on prejudice and stereotypes provided abundant evidence that people often see what they expect to see: they select evidence that confirms their stereotypes and ignore anomalies” (Jones, 1986, p. 42).

 

“The problem is that stereotypes about groups of people are overgeneralizations and are either inaccurate or do not apply to the individual group member in question … categorization can lead to oversimplification and distortion … In such instances, people tend to perceive members of the other group as all alike or to expect them to be all alike, which they never are” (APA Brief, 1991, p. 1064, emphasis in original).

 

“In this section of the paper, we consider some representative findings to illustrate the powerful effect of social stereotypes on how we process, store, and use social information about group members” (Devine, 1995, p. 476)

 

“Research has shown many ways in which stereotypes, like a dangerous virus, can survive and perpetuate themselves despite attempts to eradicate them.  They can bias the interpretation of a target person’s behavior and generate assumptions about that person in the absence of any real evidence, all in line with stereotypic content … Moreover, they can do so automatically, behind the perceiver’s back so to speak, so that he or she will have no chance to correct the situation … we do not believe that conscious control over the effects of activated stereotypes are that likely to occur outside of the laboratory …” (Chen & Bargh, 1997, p. 557)

“… stereotypes are maladaptive forms of categories because their content does not correspond to what is going on in the environment” (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999, p. 467).
“… overgeneralized sets of beliefs about members of a particular social group” (definition of “stereotype),” Schultz & Oskamp, 2002, p. 63).

 

“A stereotype is any generalization about a group … By definition, a generalization about a group is bound to be “unjustified” for some portion of the group members” (Nelson, 2002, p. 5).

 

“Expectancies exist in the eyes of beholders and actors.  As such, disconfirmation of expectancy resulting from stigma and stereotyping is very difficult” (Niemann & Maruyama, 2005, p. 415).

 

“Even when there is a “kernel” of truth to a stereotype, stereotypes are typically stronger and more pervasive than the kernel would justify (S. T. Fiske, 1998), presumably because the strength and consistency of a phenomenon are exaggerated in perceivers’ minds, augmented by processes such as selective attention, selective exposure, and selective recall” (Hall, Coats, & LeBeau, 2005, p. 914).

The references, and many more quotes like these, can be found in my book, Social Perception and Social Reality.

Apparently, as long as social psychologists believed that stereotypes were inaccurate, they considered it important to say so — over and over again.  It was only when the evidence began to come in showing otherwise that the argument that it was unimportant started to emerge.   This means that the main criteria for considering something important is not its relevance for understanding the nature of human psychological functioning — if that were the case, stereotype accuracy and inaccuracy would be considered equally important because both do so.  Thus, considering stereotype inaccuracyimportant, but stereotype accuracy unimportant represents an extraordinary scientific double standard.  And, as social psychological research has long pointed out, such double standards reflect the biases of those holding them.