Toward Understanding the Nuanced Nature of Social Stereotypes

Traditional psychological and social science theories fail to account for the specific, nuanced social stereotypes people naturally hold, for why they hold these specific stereotypes (rather than others), and, more generally, for the functional manner in which people view one another. In recent years, we have been developing and testing an alternative theoretical framework, one that incorporates insights from life history theory into an affordance-management approach to social perception. Among other contributions, this functional framework (1) provides a compelling account for why age and sex are core dimensions upon which stereotypes are built; (2) introduces the idea of ‘ecology’ stereotypes (i.e., stereotypes about people who come from ‘desperate’ versus ‘hopeful’ ecologies); (3) emphasizes that the intersections of age, sex, and ecology better characterize the content of people’s naturally-existing stereotypes; (4) predicts that natural stereotypes represent not general trait inclinations (e.g., young men are competitive) but rather behavioral inclinations as directed towards particular types of others (e.g., young men are competitive against young men); (5) suggests that, at least in the U.S., many of the most pernicious race stereotypes are more usefully conceptualized in terms of ecology than of race, per se; (6) suggests the importance of differentiating between “base” and “affordance” stereotypes for predicting prejudices and discrimination; and (7) suggests why certain social stereotypes are simultaneously as accurate as they are and biased in the particular directions they are.