Functional Significance of Conflicting Age and Wealth Cross-Categorization: The Dominant Role of Categories That Violate Stereotypical Expectations

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to identify the functional significance of conflicting stereotypes and to identify the dominant category in such conflicts. In the present research we examined the conflicting crossed categories of age and wealth with regard to warmth and competence perceptions. It was found (Pilot Study and Study 1) that the old-rich targets presented a conflicting stereotype group in the perception of warmth, whereas young-poor targets presented a conflicting stereotype group in the perception of competence. In addition, the old stereotype dominated the warmth evaluation of old-rich targets, whereas the poor stereotype dominated the competence evaluation of young-poor targets. In Study 2, participants provided warmth and competence evaluations after they learned about the targets' behaviors which demonstrated high or low warmth and high or low competence. The results suggest that for the warmth evaluation of the old-rich target the category that did not match the behavior (i.e., contradicted the stereotype expectation) was more salient and drove judgments. However, the effect of stereotype expectation violation was not found in the competence evaluation of the young-poor target. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding factors that activate and inhibit stereotyped perceptions.

Comparing race, gender, age, and career categories in recognizing and grouping tasks

“…Few studies have compared the weight of categories with social clues and categories with natural clues. One exception is a study by Song & Zuo (2016a) who found that the functional significance of age was greater than wealth when evaluating warmth, while wealth played a more significant role than age when evaluating competence.…”

“…The perception and evaluation of a target is substantially impacted by their social (occupation and wealth) and cultural identity (Song & Zuo, 2016a). Many previous studies have focused on wealth, with results showing that people, even children, prefer individuals of high socioeconomic status.…”

“…Some studies focused on target perception, where researchers used an identity recognition task to compare the speed of age and gender recognition (Cloutier, Freeman & Ambady, 2014), or applied a memory confusion task to compare the weight of gender and race in social perception (Weisman, Johnson & Shutts, 2015), or used sorting tasks in which participants sorted images into groups (Yee & Brown, 1994). Other studies focused on social attitude and evaluation, where researchers used a social preference task to determine whether people chose friends based on gender or racial similarities (Shutts, Roben & Spelke, 2013), or used a stereotypical evaluation task to determine which category played a more important role when evaluating multiple-categories target (Song & Zuo, 2016a;Song & Zuo, 2016b). The sheer variety of different experimental tasks and categories in these studies makes comparison difficult.…”

“…Based on previous studies, we assumed that participants would most quickly recognize the gender information, followed by age and then race. Since natural clue categories are more visible, easily identifiable, and repeatedly used to categorize people in daily life, they are more accessible to the perceiver (Song & Zuo, 2016a). Thus, we assumed that participants would recognize natural clue categories (gender, age, and race) more quickly than the career category.…”

“…When perceiving and evaluating a multiple-category target, a whole set of categories (e.g., gender, age, and race) compete for attention (Freeman & Ambady, 2011) and may differ in weight (Weisman, Johnson & Shutts, 2015;Zhao & Bentin, 2008). The question remains of which category plays the most important role in the perception and evaluation of multi-category targets (Song & Zuo, 2016a).…”