Affective meanings of stereotyped social groups in cross-cultural comparison

Abstract

Past research has shown that members of a given culture have consensual and stable perceptions of the affective meanings of many social concepts (Heise, 2010). We define "affective meanings" as semantic structures of concepts grounded in emotional experience (see Osgood, 1962; Osgood, May, & Miron, 1975; Rogers, Schröder, & von Scheve, in press; Schröder & Thagard, 2013). People rely on those meanings as sources of implicit cultural knowledge that constrains day-today social interaction (Heise,

The affective meanings of automatic social behaviors: Three mechanisms that explain priming.

“…Heise (2010) empirically analyzed the tremendous intracultural reliability and overtime stability of such data. Furthermore, it was shown in various studies that cross-cultural variations in these ratings can be tied to existing knowledge about the characteristics of the cultures involved (e.g., Schneider, 2004;Schröder, Rogers, et al, 2012;H. W. Smith, Matsuno, & Ike, 2001).…”

“…Since Bargh and his colleagues examined only main effects and did not report any data regarding self-concepts or target representations, we used the following default EPA profiles for the respective connection weights in our model (the self and target proxy nodes): For self, we took mean EPA ratings of "Myself as I really am" [1.97/0.75/1.04] from a recent study of stereotyping (Schröder, Rogers, et al, 2012). For target, we used ratings of "student" [1.93/0.92/1.20] from Francis and Heise's (2006) data set, since psychological experiments usually happen on campus where fellow students are the most likely interaction partners of experimental participants.…”

“…The procedure was exactly the same as described under Simulation 1, except that the connection weights of the prime and action nodes in the network were modified. To simulate the African American priming condition, we used the average evaluation-potency-activity (EPA) rating of "Blacks" [0.53/0.19/1.15] for the Caucasian condition the EPA profile for "Whites" [0.80/2.39/0.85], from Schröder, Rogers, et al's (2012) study on affective meanings of stereotypes. There was no control condition in the original experiment.…”

“…The selection was constrained by the availability of relevant concepts in the databases of affective meanings that we used as sources of input for the simulations (Francis & Heise, 2006;Schröder, 2011;Schröder, Rogers, Ike, Mell, & Scholl, 2012).…”

Consensus and stratification in the affective meaning of human sociality

“…Consensus in affective meanings, i.e., concordance in the relative importance of these dimensions, is generally smaller across than within cultural groups. Differences have been shown to be systematically tied to culture-specific traits such as individualism vs. collectivism or power distance, which correspond to community and authority, respectively, as elementary forms of sociality (28)(29)(30).…”