The beliefs that human beings hold about social groups and the members of those groups (including their ingroup), represent among the most basic of all human knowledge. These beliefs help create our self-concept and define our relationships with others. They influence our career aspirations and task performance (Stangor & Sechrist, 1998) and impact our mental and physical health (Stangor, 2003). Intergroup beliefs may also lead to local and worldwide hostility and violence and produce gender, racial, and class disparities (Staub, 1989). But intergroup beliefs also lead to intergroup cooperation and attempts to increase social harmony, tolerance, and equality (Moskowitz, Wasel, Schaal, & Gollwitzer, 1999). Because they are such a critical aspect of human existence, intergroup beliefs and attitudes have been actively studied by social psychologists, developmental psychologists, educational psychologists, sociologists, politicians, historians, and others. From the point of view of social psychology, intergroup beliefs are important not only because of their social relevance, but also because they involve a wide variety of basic psychological processes, including attitudes, conformity, person perception, heuristic processing, perceptual biases, and self-evaluation. Intergroup attitudes are generally considered within the social psychology literature as stereotypes and prejudice. Over the past 50 years we can say that there have been two basic streams of research in this topic. One line has primarily addressed individual social cognition, focused on the basic processes of social categorization and social judgment. This research has studied the development, maintenance, and change of stereotypes and prejudice through information processing biases that result from perception, and particularly, misperception of the social environment (Hamilton & Sherman, 1994; Stangor & Lange, 1994). These approaches have generally addressed the issue of stereotype development and change by studying how individuals directly perceive and interpret the social categories and the behaviors of others (Hewstone, 1996). This research includes such phenomena as illusory correlations (Hamilton, 1981), memory biases (Stangor & McMillan, 1992), categorization and recategorization (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993), and the transmission of beliefs through the media (Ruscher, 2001). We can call these approaches bottom-up, because they involve extracting meaning from direct observations of others. These approaches have generally focused on the cognitive, rather than the affective or motivational components of group perceptions, although motivations are not irrelevant to the outcome of these processes (Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Sasser, 1994; Sinclair & Kunda, 2000). Indeed, although primarily cognitive in outlook, this approach is based on the assumption that intergroup beliefs serve the motivational goal of providing cognitive economy by helping provide clear, simple, and potentially useful information about group differences (Allport, 1954; Diehl & Jonas, 1991; Ford & Stangor, 1992; Oakes, Turner, & Haslam, 1991). A second stream of theorizing can be considered more top-down in orientation, in the sense that it has investigated the function of stereotypes and prejudice for individuals and their social communication and exchange (Stangor & Schaller, 1996). In this literature the self-concept, including not only its cognitive but also its affective and motivational components, is perceived as an integral part of intergroup perceptions. Literature related to this latter stream includes, for instance, the concept of the Authoritarian Personality, which was based on the notion that prejudice served a psychodynamic function for individuals and was created by early family experiences (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Harding, Proshansky, Kutner, & Chein, 1969; Snyder & Miene, 1994). Other approaches within this stream include the suggestion that stereotypes function to preserve the social system or status quo (Jost & Banaji, 1994), that stereotypes develop to justify prejudice and discrimination (Allport, 1954), and that group beliefs allow enhancing the self and the ingroup (Allport, 1954; Tajfel & Turner, 2004; Wills, 1981). Still another line that exemplifies the top-down approach is based on the idea that stereotypes and prejudice are the result of social norms (Allport, 1954; Crandall & Stangor, 2005). This approach proposes that stereotypes and prejudice are developed, maintained, and changed as a result of social communication and the perception of the beliefs of others, and in service of the underlying social goal of conformity and acceptance. In short, according to this perspective, stereotypes and prejudice are learned more from other ingroup members than from the observation of outgroup members. In this chapter we review current literature related to the top-down, social approaches to intergroup beliefs, with an emphasis on data from our lab. Our goal is to consider intergroup beliefs in their social context-as social and psychologically meaningful constructs for individuals. We will consider these processes by focusing on the acquisition and social sharing of stereotypes and prejudice. Our review is based on the expectation that individuals hold beliefs about social groups because these beliefs are an integral part of our social experience, they represent social norms, and allow us to meet fundamental social goals. It is our hope that such an analysis will be informative about intergroup attitudes in general and also help better tie these important concepts to social behavior. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
