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Original communications

Social attribution, correspondence bias, and the emergence of stereotypes

*This research has been completed in partial requirement of a doctoral dissertation of the first author under the supervision of the second author. We wish to thank the members of the social psychology division at the University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve, especially Steve Rocher and Emanuele Castano for their insightful comments on preliminary drafts. This paper has been enriched by feedbacks received from Russell Spears, Roos Vonk, Margit Oswald, and anonymous reviewers. Many thanks to Philippe Kemp and Christophe Remy for their assistance in running the study, and to the students who volunteered to appear on the video. This research has been presented at the Social Cognition workshop of the Kurt Lewin Institute, workshop held at the Free University of Amsterdam in April 1998: we want to thank participants of this workshop and especially Gün Semin for their useful feedback. Completion of this study benefited from a research grant from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research to the first author.

Published Online:September 01, 2006https://doi.org/10.1024//1421-0185.58.4.233

Abstract

Yzerbyt, Rogier and Fiske (1998) argued that perceivers confronted with a group high in entitativity (i.e., a group perceived as an entity, a tight-knit group) more readily call upon an underlying essence to explain people's behavior than perceivers confronted with an aggregate. Their study showed that group entitativity promoted dispositional attributions for the behavior of group members. Moreover, stereotypes emerged when people faced entitative groups. In this study, we replicate and extend these results by providing further evidence that the process of social attribution is responsible for the emergence of stereotypes. We use the attitude attribution paradigm (Jones & Harris, 1967) and show that the correspondence bias is stronger for an entitative group target than for an aggregate. Besides, several dependent measures indicate that the target's group membership stands as a plausible causal factor to account for members' behavior, a process we call Social Attribution. Implications for current theories of stereotyping are discussed.

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