MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SOCIAL-GROUPS - ADVANCES IN UNDERSTANDING STEREOTYPES AND STEREOTYPING

The chapter reviews the major advance in conceptualizing stereotypes that has occurred over the past 20 years. Conceptualizing social stereotypes as mental representations represents a true advance in experimental social psychology. The chapter presents a concrete version of a simple associational model. The power of the associational model is that it explains how stereotypes become activated in memory on exposure to the category label. The theorists variously considered generalization, homogeneity, and group differences to be important features of stereotypes, although disagreeing among themselves regarding the relative importance of each. Considering stereotypes, in terms of abstract mental representations produces a reconciliation of these diverging definitions. The chapter presents techniques of stereotype measurement. The chapter presents the structural approach that has proved to be informative in promoting an understanding of why stereotypes maintain themselves even in the face of conflicting information, and in predicting how and when they will change. In terms of stereotype change, the structural approach suggests methods of changing stereotypes that go beyond those offered by traditional models of stereotyping. The chapter discusses the current limitations of and the possible future for the abstractionist approach, by working in two directions—that is, a micro-analytic and macro-analytic approach. © 1994 Academic Press Inc.