The Interaction Of Primary And Secondary Social Categories

In daily life,individuals can classify strangers automatically and quickly according to the multiple social information of gender,age,race,etc.Besides being influenced by the bottom-up phenotypic cues(such as skin color,wrinkles,etc.)which provided by social categories,the categorization process is also affected by top-down stereotype information activated by social categories.However,with the development of human society,in addition to the social categories,such as age,sex,race and so on,human beings have their own unique social categories,that is,according to occupation,social stratum and other social categories to divide groups.So those individual innate,natural,specific social categories called primary social categories,including gender,race,age and so on;What we call secondary social categories,which are acquired by individuals,environmental impact,abstract social categories,includes occupation,religion,social class and so on.Although scholars have basically agreed that there are two types of interaction between primary social categories: symmetric and asymmetric,and the phenotypic overlap of category cues and the corresponding stereotype overlap affect this interaction,the interaction between primary and secondary social categories is still vagueis.Up to now,scholars only confine that the existence of interaction between primary and secondary social categories,and the bottom-up category cues have an impact on the interaction.Therefore,this study takes gender and occupation as an example,based on the perspective of stereotype overlap,and uses ERPs(event-related potentials technology)to explore the cognitive neural mechanism of the interaction between primary and secondary social categories.This study consists of four experiments.First,a behavioral experiment was used to verify the interaction between gender and occupation,and then the ERP technique was used to investigate the influence of stereotype information on the interaction.Then we discuss the overlap of stereotype information which affects the interaction of two categories through two experiments.Experiment one sets four stimulus targets:male nurse,female nurse,male police officer and female policeman by changing the professional dress under different gender faces,and adopts Ghana choice paradigm to investigate the interaction between gender and occupation.The results showed that there was asymmetrical interaction between sex and occupation.Occupation affected sex classification,but gender had no effect on occupational classification.Based on these results,present study further explored the mechanism of gender and occupational category interaction and the role of stereotype information in it with the help of EEG technology.The results of experiment two show that the interaction between occupation and sex occurs in different stages of perceptual processing,that is,there are differences in the time course of category classification because of the different tasks.The influence of occupation on sex classification is mainly reflected in P1 and LPC components,while the influence of sex on occupational classification only exists in P2 component.It can be seen that bottom-up occupational category cues influence gender classification,but gender category cues do not affect occupational classification.At the same time,top-down occupational stereotype information affects gender classification.And gender stereotype information also affects occupational classification.This shows that the interaction between gender and occupation is symmetrical from the influence of stereotype information,which is caused by the overlap of gender and occupational stereotype.Based on this inference,this study uses implicit association test to directly present the target professional dress and target face pictures to the subjects to prove that gender and occupational category directly activate the corresponding stereotype.And there is a stereotype connection between gender and occupational categories.By changing the gender faces into the gender idiosyncratic words,it is proved that gender and occupational stereotypes overlap.Combined with the ERP results of study 3 and 4,it can be seen that when presenting professional dress to the individual,the corresponding professional stereotype is first activated.And because the occupational stereotype overlaps with the gender stereotype,the gender stereotype of the overlapping part is also activated.When the gender stereotype which activates by the gender face presented to the subjects is not consistent with the gender stereotype of the activated overlapping part,it causes a larger N300 and N400 component,and vice versa.To sum up,there is an interaction between primary and secondary social categories,which is influenced not only by the bottom-up category cues,but also by the top-down stereotype overlap.When individuals identify strangers,the cues of primary and secondary social categories not only activate the categories,but also activate the corresponding stereotypes.When there is overlapping stereotype between the two categories,the interaction between them will be affected.Finally,the results of this study are generally consistent with the dynamic interactive theory of person construal,but the greatest highlight of the study is the introduction of the concept of secondary social category.It is not limited to the previous study of the interaction between primary social categories.Taking gender and occupation as examples,this paper explores the interaction between primary and secondary categories.In addition,we use ERPs technology to expand the dynamic interactive theory of person construal from the point of view of interaction time process.