Nivel de Comprensión Lectora

The greater part of early research into stereotyping behaviour was descriptive in nature, attempting to define the contents of particular groups' stereotypes of other groups (see, e.g., Allen and Wilder, 1975; Billig and Tajfel, 1973; Gilbert, 1951; Karlins, Coffman and Walters, 1969; Katz and Braly, 1933; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament, 1971; Taylor and Jaggi, 1974). These studies demonstrate stereotypic bias in terms of how members of particular social groups are perceived, and the way in which their behaviour or psychological characteristics are judged. More recent work has concentrated less on the contents of stereotypes as on providing explanations of how and why they arise. Tajfel (1981) characterises this work

as favouring one of two different types of explanation: the social or the cognitive. As Ashmore and Del Boca (1981) point out, the "social" orientation may further be broken down into "sociocultural" and "psychodynamic" approaches: however, for the sake of simplicity, this scheme is not adopted in this review. The present sub-section considers social explanations as a single unified approach.

This social approach can be characterised as being concerned with questions of a descriptive sort, such as "what are the contents of ingroup x's stereotype of outgroup y?" (see, e.g., the list presented above) and more general theoretical questions of the sort "how do stereotypes affect perceptions of outgroup members?" (e.g., Jussim, Coleman and Lerch, 1987), and "what social needs does the act of stereotyping fulfill?" (e.g.. Testa, Kinder and Ironson, 1987). The cognitive approach meanwhile has tended to consider questions of the sort "what mental processes give rise to stereotypes?" (e.g., Morgan, 1989,), and "how is stereotypic information organised in memory?" (e.g., Hastie, 1981). As Tajfel (1981) remarks, we can afford to ignore neither approach. We will never have a complete picture of the functions of stereotypes without considering both the cognitive and social aspects of the question. Indeed, it has been argued that the cognitive approach may be meaningless on its own, as the social circumstances which determine stereotypes is in constant flux (Haslam, 1985). An

attempt to produce a coherent theory of the "social functions of stereotypes" must, Tajfel argues, "bring together what is known from social psychology, social history, social anthropology and common sense" (Tajfel, 1981, p 160). Three such social functions of stereotypes can be identified, and examples are cited from the literature in support of these.

Social stereotypes can be used as part of an attempt to understand large, complex, and often distressing social events. A colourful example of the use of stereotypes in this fashion is the "explanation" given for the English plague of the seventeenth century - this was blamed on "untrustworthy" Scots (for reasons of their own) poisoning the wells of Newcastle (Thomas, 1973, cited in Tajfel, 1981, p 161). The outbreak of the Austrian civil war in 1934 was attributed to destructive Bolshevik tendencies; resulting in the hanging or internment of members of the Social Democratic party (Scheithauer, Woratschek and Tscherne, 1983).

Second, stereotypes can be used to justify actions (whether planned for the future or committed in the past) against outgroups. Tajfel illustrates this principle by reference to the work of Kiernan (1972), who finds that European conquest of foreign countries was justified by a stereotype of other races as in need of "advancement" through the good offices of the Europeans; and the belief of the English in India that "en agissant avec des brutes il faut être brutal*^.

historical example of a stereotype being used to justify negative behaviour towards an outgroup (Shirer, 1959).

The final social function of stereotypes is positively to discriminate the ingroup from outgroups. This will be particularly important at a time when such differences are seen to be being eroded, or when further justification is required for negative action (social, cultural, or political) against an outgroup. This is certainly the most extensively researched of the social functions of stereotypes. Tajfel (1957/59/69) developed a theory which holds that the effect of categorisation is the cognitive exaggeration of differences between categories, and the minimisation of differences within categories. Such an effect holds not only for physical stimuli such as lines (Tajfel and Wilkes, 1963,) and nonsense stimuli (Campbell, 1956), but also for social stimuli. Secord, Bevan and Katz (1956), for example, found that highly prejudiced white subjects tended to perceive the skin colour of blacks as darker than in fact it was: a fairly clear example of the exaggeration of between-category differences. Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament (1971) asked: "Can the very act of social categorisation, as far as it can be identified and isolated from other variables, lead - under certain conditions - to intergroup behaviour which discriminates against the outgroup and favours the ingroup?" (Tajfel et al, 1971, p 151). Tajfel attempted to answer this question through the

construction of "minimal groups". His work (e.g., Billig and Tajfel, 1973; Tajfel and Billig, 1974) repeatedly demonstrated that the construction of groups along even such artificial axes as preference for the paintings of Klee or Kandinsky, or even the outcome of a coin-toss, is sufficient to cause ingroup bias. This effect is increased with the introduction into the social situation of further variables which are normally associated with groups (Rabbie and Horwitz, 1969).

Early explanations of these results centred around what Tajfel (1969/70) termed the "generic norm" of ingroup favouritism. For a number of reasons however (see Billig, 1976), this conceptualisation does not appear tenable. Later explanations (e.g., Tajfel, 1972; Turner, 1975) have centred around social identity theory. Every individual, the theory holds, tries to form and maintain a positive self-concept. This has two aspects: the personal and the social identity. In different situations, one or the other of these aspects of the self-concept will become more or less salient. The social identity of a group is always achieved with reference to some outgroup. A social category marks the ingroup off from outgroups; and, furthermore, allows for explicit comparison of the groups along one or more dimensions. Denigration of the outgroup causes elevation of the ingroup, and consequent raising of social esteem. This process can work only if subjects actively engage in a social comparison process, and it is a strength of this

approach that it explains the counter-intuitive finding that in a social categorisation situation, subjects often act not only to maximise ingroup benefits, but also intergroup differences (Turner, 1975). Such phenomena as ingroup favouritism are therefore seen as consequences of attempts to achieve or maintain a positive social identity. Such effects may be explicable in terms of norms: when people are assigned to in- and outgroups, the concept of teams,

and therefore the competitive norm, are evoked (Wetherell, 1981, personal communication). While the theory has not been without its critics (see Aschenbrenner and Schaeffer, 1980, and Brown, Tajfel and Turner, 1980), its major supposition - that of a link between intergroup discrimination and self-esteem - has been experimentally demonstrated on at least two occasions (Oakes and Turner, 1980; Lemyre and Smith,

1985).

Social identity theory appears therefore to provide, as Brown (1988) remarks, a plausible account of people's readiness to favour even the most minimal of ingroups. Neither is its applicability limited to the somewhat artificial situations which have tended to be used in the laboratory; it is also attractive insofar as Tajfel (1982) and Brown (1984) have shown it can also account for other, real-world phenomena. Indeed, it has been shown even outside the laboratory that the degree of matching of in- to outgroup attitudes may be negatively correlated with intergroup animosity (Thompson, 1988). Similar effects have also been

demonstrated by Taylor and Jaggi (1974) and by Hewstone and Ward (1985); and may be maintained by illusory correlation (Chapman, 1967; Hamilton, 1981): A person's social world may consist of members of in- and outgroups performing positive and negative actions. Ingroup members may be encountered twice as often as outgroup members, and positive actions twice as often as negative actions. Where two relatively rare occurrences ( an outgroup member and a negative action) are encountered together, this event will be particularly memorable and their instance of co­ occurrence will be over-estimated.

Another possible explanation of ingroup bias is that proposed by Dion (1979), using an analogy to the Gestalt in perceptual psychology. Categorisation is held to divide the social environment into mutually exclusive categories: ingroups and outgroups. Since the categories do not overlap, subjects expect to encounter social information which differentiates between them. Also, they will tend to act so as to accentuate these perceived differences. Intergroup discrimination, according to this view, is one means of maintaining cognitive differentiation between groups.

Views such as these might be taken to imply a social function or significance in social memory and indeed social "forgetting". Differential memory of actions of in- and outgroup members would tend to enhance the subjective social worth of the ingroup and denigrate that of the outgroup, so long as positive instances of

ingroup behaviour are better remembered than negative instances, and vice versa. Also, such a process might maximise the perceived difference between social groups. Such effects would be particularly relevant to the eyewitness situation.

Howard and Rothbart (1980) found that the simple categorisation of persons into in- and outgroups is sufficient to bias their recall of information about the groups. This bias is found to favour the ingroup: more "positive" descriptors are recalled that applied to the ingroup; and more "negative" descriptors that applied to the outgroup. Wilder (1981) reports an experiment in which subjects were better able to recall information relating to ingroup similarities and outgroup dissimilarities (relative to themselves) than vice versa. On a recognition task, they made more false identifications of characteristics that implied ingroup similarity and outgroup dissimilarity (to themselves) than vice versa. Such an effect may hold even for material with less external validity, e.g., Tsujimoto (1978). The more salient is category membership, the more powerful the effects are likely to be (Cantor and Mischel, 1977; Haslam, 1985). The effects of stereotypes on memory are discussed more fully in Chapter 6.

Despite this wealth of research, however, as Tajfel (1979) remarks, the purely "social" approach to stereotyping has yet to address some basic questions concerned with the occurrence of stereotypes.

Questions which remain unanswered are of the sort: "Why, when and how is a social categorisation salient or not salient? What kind of shared constructions of social reality, mediated

through social categorisations, lead to a social climate in which large masses of people feel that they are in long-term conflict with other large masses? What, for example, are the

psychological transitions from a stable to an

unstable social system?" (Tajfel, 1979, p 188) Equally, the social approach has been unable to answer the question of how social stereotypes operate. For an answer to this question, it is necessary to look at social cognitive research.