The Stereotype Effect In The Processing Of Multiple Social Categories

Freeman and Ambady proposed a dynamic model of personal interaction,that the perception of others is done by a dynamic system,with top-down factors and bottom-up factors interacted.The top-down factors such as stereotypes,emotions and motivations interacted with bottom-up sensory information.Category-level processing and stereotype-level processing are dynamic interacted and bi-directional.Categorization activated the corresponding stereotypes,and stereotypes in turn activated categories(Freeman,& Ambady,2011;Freeman,& Johnson,2016).There is a widespread interaction between gender category,race category,or emotion category,and researchers believed that the activation of stereotypes affected social categorization.However,few empirical studies have proved the effect of stereotype in social categorization.According to the distributed neural models of face perception(Haxby,Hoffman & Gobbini,2000),the dimensions that faces can embody are divided into two categories: one is a dynamically variable dimension(eg,expression,eye gaze orientation,etc.),which changed due to facial changes.Another is the invariant dimension(eg,race and gender,etc.),which will keep relatively stable and consistent for person.We categorized gender and race categories as invariable dimension and categorized emotion categories as variable dimension.In this paper,we will discuss the effect of gender stereotypes in variable category(emotion)processing,the overlapped effect of stereotypes in the process of invariant category(race or gender),and the degree of stereotype association(black-male,Yellow-women)on the multi-category processing.Experiment 1 explored the impact of gender stereotype activation on emotional category processing.The results showed that the activation of male stereotypes promoted the processing of angry emotional categories.The activation of female stereotypes promoted the processing of happy emotional categories.Experiment 2a explored the impact of gender stereotype activation on the processing of racial categories.The results showed that the activation of male stereotypes could promote the processing of the black race,and the activation of female stereotypes would promote the processing of the yellow race.Experiment 2b explores the impact of ethnic stereotype activation on the processing of gender categories.As a result,it is found that the activation of stereotypes in blacks promotes gender-based processing in men and the activation of stereotypes promotes the processing of gender dimensions in women.The results of Experiment 2 also showed the overlapping effects of gender stereotypes and racial stereotypes in multiple category processing(gender and race).Experiment 3explored the impact of the level of association between black-male and yellow-female on multiple category processing(gender and race).The results found that the participants who held relatively strong associations between the categories of Asian/female and the categories of Black/male would exhibit stronger categorization biases.