| Stereotype is one of the important subjects of group psychology researches. The term "stereotype" was put forward by a news reporter named W. Lippman in his work public opinion. The experimental study of undergraduates' social stereotype conducted by Katz and Braly in 1933 was classical. In this study, they not only verified the existence of stereotype, but also developed a research paradigm. Their procedure has dominated the field for 40 years and elicited many researches. In the early phase of stereotyping research, the researchers focused almost exclusively on identifying the content of stereotypes about different social groups. However, by the early 1970s, influenced by cognitive psychology, stereotyping research moved away from content identification to process analysis. Is the perceived central tendency more likely to be used to make a judgment of the out-group or the in-group? Is the out-group viewed as having more fixed impression than the in-group? Such problems attracted researchers' attention.Tajfel's (1969) pioneering research showed that group membership leads to accentuation of intergroup differences and intragroup similarities. This accentuation is asymmetrical. It reflects in-group favoritism and out-group homogeneity. In-group is the group that an individual belongs to. Out-group is the group he does not belong to. In-group favoritism means people tend to believe their own group superior to other groups. The researchers also find that people perceive out-group as more fixed and stereotypic, which is known as out-group homogeneity effect. Out-group homogeneity means people view out-group members as more similar, less diverse and more stereotypic.The early researches on out-group homogeneity mostly relied on natural group such as ethnic and national group, and membership was considered as the only cause of out-group homogeneity effect. With the development of studies, researches are expanded to the context of minimal and special groups. A variety of methods have been used to explore this phenomenon. In addition to measuring and describing this effect, researchers explored its internal mechanism, and advanced many mental representation models, such as prototype model, exemplar model, and mixed model. Although out-group homogeneity effect received many experimental supports, the research outcomes were not always consistent. Because of different experimental results, researchers didn't consider membership of a group as the only cause of out-group homogeneity effect. Researches focus on the mediating variables such as group size, typicality of attribute and status. However these factors can only explain a certain experimental result or a certain group. A lot of problems in this field deserved further exploration and many underlying factors may influence this effect.The issue of out-group homogeneity effect has not been researched yet in ourcountry. Cross-culture study found there was cultural diversity in group perceptions. The first purpose of this research is, based on the previous research, to investigate out-group homogeneity effect for naturally occurring groups defined in terms of age and gender in our country's cultural context. The second purpose is to examine the effect of familiarity on out-group homogeneity. According to familiarity hypotheses advanced by Linville et al, greater familiarity with the members of a group leads to greater perceived differentiation, instead lower familiarity with members of out-group leads to out-group homogeneity. Maybe it is an important variable that influence out-group homogeneity. It is a pity that Linville et al. did not measure and compare the different familiarity with in-group and out-group in their research. They just estimated based on their experience. This certainly affects the objectivity of the result. This research adopted perceived dispersion measure. The independent variable was probability of differentiation (Pd). In experimental 1, We used age as in-group-out-group variable, resulting in a 2 (subject group: old ,young) X 2 (... |
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