Associate Professor of Psychology Keelah Williams co-authored a paper on “The directed nature of social stereotypes,” recently published online before its inclusion in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Williams, with lead author Oliver Sng (University of Toronto), and Rebecca Neel and Minyoung Choi (University of California, Irvine), proposed that in addition to holding stereotypes about what groups are generally like, people also hold what they call “directed stereotypes,” or stereotypes about how groups behave toward specific groups.
Using results from two U.S. studies that examined directed stereotypes of sex and age, and two that looked at race and ethnicity (specifically Asian/Black/Latino/White Americans), the researchers focused on stereotypes of competitiveness, aggressiveness, cooperativeness, and communion.
They found that “across studies, directed stereotypes present unique patterns that both qualify and reverse well-documented stereotype patterns in the literature.” As an example, they said that although men are typically stereotyped as more competitive than women, “directed stereotypes show that women are stereotyped to be more competitive than men, when this competitiveness is directed toward young women.”
They concluded that though the idea of directed stereotypes may be the same across populations, the specific patterns that emerge may vary. They also noted that “the application of directed stereotypes may be constrained to stereotypes of traits and behaviors that involve behavior between individuals/groups.”
