Studies On Regional Stereotype

Stereotype, which is a common cognitive phenomenon throughout our daily life, is also a remarkable research focus in the filed of Sociology. Since last 90s, Greenwald and Banaji, as well as domestic scholar Yang Zhiliang, brought forward the concept of Implicit Social Cognition respectively. Implicit Stereotype, together with Implicit Self-esteem and Implicit Attitude, has become the main research content of Implicit Social Cognition.Regional Stereotype is a cognitive structure concerns about the knowledge, attitude and anticipation toward the people who lived in a certain region. Few researches have conducted in this field in China. This dissertation used multiple measure instruments as assessment tools, as well as new immigrants and local residents of the city as subjects, to investigate the existence, stability, and attribution bias of the regional stereotype.The entire research consists of three parts.Experiment 1 used processing tasks of two different depths to initiate the regional stereotype. The results show the existence of regional stereotype, and it is an auto-motivated attitude caused by external stimulus. Meanwhile, processing tasks of different depths may lead to different level of stereotype. Regional stereotype also has a priming effect.Experiment 2 used IAT as the assessment tool to investigate the stability of regional stereotype. The results show that the level of regional stereotype changes real slow. In-group effect is also found in the experiment.Experiment 3 introduced a new measure instrument SEB questionnaire. The results show that the SEB tool is real effective to assess the regional stereotype. SEB can also prove the stability and inter-group effect of regional stereotype. Furthermore, new immigrants and local residents show different attribution bias.