Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Prejudice and Discrimination Arise—and Change?
Follow the proposed links between social position, stereotype content, emotion, and treatment.
Why you’re reading it. Explain why prejudice may involve mixed evaluations rather than simple dislike.
A question to consider. Could describing a group as warm but incapable support exclusion even when the description sounds sympathetic?
Why this reading
Stereotypes can combine favorable and unfavorable judgments. This review explains a framework for relating perceived intentions and capabilities to emotions and patterns of help or harm.
Before you read
Warmth concerns perceived intentions, including trustworthiness and friendliness; competence concerns perceived capability. These are judgments about people, not established properties of the groups being judged. A stereotype can be ambivalent rather than uniformly positive or negative.
Read for
- Trace the proposed links from status and interdependence to stereotypes, emotions, and behavior.
- Distinguish surveys of society's presumed views from participants' own evaluations and observed treatment.
- Compare the two-dimension framework with the alternative approaches and measurement tasks discussed in the review.
Consider afterwards
- A group is described as competent but untrustworthy. What does the model predict, and what evidence would test that prediction without assuming the description is accurate?
Editorial context
The review advocates a framework and assembles several kinds of evidence; it is not a systematic estimate of every proposed causal link. The dimensions organize some judgments without exhausting stereotype content. The paper itself discusses task differences, ideology, and perceiver-dependent evaluations. Neither its group examples nor its generality claims justify treating stereotypes as fixed across settings.