Stereotypes as Shared Beliefs: Effects of Group Identity on Dyadic Conversations

Abstract

Two experiments examined the infl uence of stereotypes on dyadic conversations. Undergraduate students listened to a recorded interview of a student who was described as either a member of their in-group or of an out-group. The interview contained stereotypeconsistent (SC) and stereotype-inconsistent (SI) descriptions of each group. Participants' conversations about the stimulus person were content-analyzed. One most consistent result was that for the out-group target, participants made more SI than SC utterances and spent more time discussing SI information. The difference between SC and SI utterances disappeared (Study 2) or was reversed (Study 1) for the in-group target. These patterns were observed particularly when the stimulus information contained a balanced combination of SC and SI characteristics. Furthermore, the stereotypicality of the conversations was related not only to the participant's own judgments but also to the partner's judgments. The signifi cance of studying stereotypes as collectively shared intergroup attitudes is discussed.keywords conversation, group identity, shared cognition, stereotype-consistent and inconsistent Author's note Address correspondence to Minoru Karasawa, Department of Psychology, School of Informatics and Sciences, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan [email: mkarasawa@nagoya-u Stereotypic beliefs concerning social groups and categories often entail a high level of consensus in their contents. Likely sources of this concordance include social learning from parents, peers, and mass media. The collectively shared nature exemplifies the significance of stereotypes and prejudices not merely as products of intra-individual processes (e.g. effects of salience, categorization, and biased information processing) but also as phenomena at the intergroup level (Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994). In recent years, researchers from different perspectives, including the social cognition approach (e.g. Gardner, 1994;Stangor & Schaller, 1996), the social identity perspective (e.g. Haslam et al., 1996), and communication research (e.g. Ruscher, 2001) have begun to pay attention to the status of stereotypes as collectively shared Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 10(4)516 reality (Hardin & Higgins, 1996;Kashima, 2000;Lyons & Kashima, 2003).In the process of social learning of stereotypes, communication without doubt plays a critical role. For instance, conversations with family members and friends often contain stereotypic remarks which will in turn facilitate the formation and maintenance of collectively shared representations (e.g. Ruscher, 2001;Van Dijk, 1987). The main purpose of the present study was to investigate how stereotypic expectations infl uence conversations about a member of a group. Specifi cally, we focused on how people discuss stereotype-consistent (SC) and stereotypeinconsistent (SI) information in dyadic conversations. The signifi cance of examining SC and SI information lies in the fact that these two kinds of information appear to be related, respectively,...

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