6. Dig Deeper
Expand for description
Challenge yourself with additional ideas, or skip this section if you’d like to stick to the basics and make sure you understand the fundamentals
Individuation Versus Stereotyping
Something else worth pointing out — and you may have noticed it already — is that someone with a lot of experience with members of a particular social category (maybe they know a lot of athletes or computer programmers) is more likely to individuate and less likely to stereotype — even then they engage in automatic processing. This is true not just for social categories but any category, such as when a bird expert encounters birds.
Why would that be? Doesn’t individuation require controlled processing?
Isn’t the use of stereotypes defining of automatic processing?
Not necessarily.
We are only scratching the surface of a significant and immense area of theory and research. Even though we are simplifying concepts to understand the basics, it is important to keep in mind that these topics have a lot of complexity. One aspect of this complexity is that cognitive processes and the mental representations they operate on are not the same and do not have a one-to-one correspondence.
What does that mean? It means stereotypes are not reserved for automatic processing. Controlled processing can also use stereotypes (e.g., Kunda & Spencer, 2003), while individuation can also be automatic.
Let’s think about why that may be from a cognitive perspective. What does more experience mean in terms of the semantic knowledge acquired? It means more variability — I hope you came up with that before you read it! When our mental representations of a category have a lot of variability, they are less reliant on the central tendency (e.g., Johnson, 2001).
In other words, the more experience you have with the members of a category, the less you think of these members as being ‘typical’ or ‘atypical’ for the category. Your notion of ‘typicality’ does not match the central tendency of the broader category because you are no longer categorizing in that broad sense! You tend to differentiate among the members (i.e. individuate) rather than lump them together or look for similarities (i.e. categorize/stereotype).
The hallmark of expertise is knowing and attending to what features define each exemplar/individual within a group, as opposed to what makes them part of the group (though, of course, experts know and attend to this latter set of features, too) (e.g., Hugenberg et al., 2010).
Of course, there are more layers to this — beyond experience with the group and size of the group — especially in social context. For example, self-categorization and motivation related to personal and social identity play a significant role in how we mentally represent groups and the degree to which we perceive these groups as homogeneous or heterogeneous (e.g., Brewer, 1993; Doosje et al., 1995; Park & Rothbart, 1982; Simon & Brown, 1987).
