IN SEARCH OF SIMILARITY - STEREOTYPES AS NAIVE THEORIES IN SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION

Traditionally, models of categorization have been based on the premise that, in categorization, stimuli are grouped together because they ap pear similar to each other. In the social domain, where categorization processes are thought to play an important role in the phenomenon of stereotyping, such a similarity-based conception of category organizat ion seems inadequate. Stereotypes, as categorical knowledge associated with social groups, generally reflect the perceiver's subjective cons trual of similarity relations in the social environment, instead of th ese similarity relations being based on an a priori structure of attri bute covariations. Moreover, people's knowledge about social categorie s generally goes beyond assumptions regarding the presence or absence of category attributes that presumably define similarity relations. In many instances, social categorical knowledge includes important assum ptions about how group attributes are related to one another; and the grouping of the social environment therefore reflects the perceiver's inferences and causal attributions based on this knowledge. Two experi ments are reported to illustrate these arguments. The possibility of c onceptualizing stereotypes as social knowledge organized by the percei ver's naive theories is explored as an alternative to a purely similar ity-based categorization model.