Exposure to atypical exemplars : implications for stereotypic judgments of the group and the individual

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2004
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Social judgment research indicates that the direction of social judgments is dependent upon how a judge categorizes both the contextual stimuli and the target. Specifically, when a target is included in the representation of the contextual information, the target judgment will be assimilated towards the implications of the context, and vice versa. If the target is excluded from the representation of the context, the implications of the context will be contrasted away from the target, and vice versa. Exposure to a member of a stereotyped group thus affects subsequent judgments of both the group and the individual, but in opposite ways, and the direction is dependent upon whether the judge includes the individual in the stereotyped group or excludes the individual from the group. The present research builds upon these findings in three significant ways. First, unlike most previous studies, the exemplar we are examining is atypical in that it does not manifest all the expected traits associated with its group. Further, we examine not only the effect on the stereotyped group, but also the effect on the exemplar to which participants were originally exposed. Third, the contextual information is more complex than it has been in previous studies, with the intent of making such a presentation more naturalistic. The results revealed that including a well-integrated but atypical individual in, or excluding this individual from, a stereotyped group did not influence subsequent judgments of the stereotypicality of the group or of the individual. However, the order in which participants answered questions about the target (either group followed by individual, or individual followed by group), did influence judgments of stereotypicality. The factors that influence judges' categorization decisions are discussed in relation to these findings.
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