Stereotypes and Person Construal: A Computational Model Analysis

Stereotypes have been found to influence people's thoughts and behaviour even though relying on stereotypical information is considered completely unacceptable. Stereotypes relevant to the social situation activate automatically and they fill in the information gaps about other individuals in order to make the social encounters less complex or overwhelming. Stereotypes have been a very popular research topic for many decades and the negative effects of stereotyping have been widely demonstrated by the previous research. However, the previous research has not focused on trying to understand the underlying mechanism or cause of stereotypes. For that reason, the aim of this research project aims to identify the basis of stereotyping using computational modelling.
This research project will conduct a series of decision-making tasks where participants make judgments whether the presented face-label pairs are culturally stereotypical or counter-stereotypical. The faces are either male or female faces and they are shown either with a female-stereotypical or male-stereotypical label or context. Participants will need to respond as quickly and accurately as possible as the reaction time and accuracy will be measured and analysed to explore the differences in processing stereotypical and counter-stereotypical information. The stereotypical face-label pairs are expected to be quicker and more accurate than the counter-stereotypic pairs as stereotyping exists in order to simplify and facilitate social situations. In order to explore the underlying mechanism of stereotypes, the data will be analysed using computational modelling which will be able to pinpoint whether the decision-making process during stereotypical judgments is driven by pre-existing bias towards preferring stereotypic information or whether this kind of information is processed more quickly than counter-stereotypical information. Additionally, this research project will investigate how these stereotypical judgments are moderated by different factors and different kinds of gender stereotypes (e.g., professions, personality traits, contexts, face stereotypicality, individual differences).
This research project will be able to improve understanding why stereotyping still occurs and influences people's thoughts and behaviour. The expected findings will improve the understanding of stereotypes and why they occur. These findings will be also able to help to design more efficient interventions to reduce the effect of stereotyping and to avoid its negative consequences. This research project will inspire the future research to improve the understanding of stereotypes and to create new and more efficient intervention strategies to reduce the effect of stereotyping.