Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping.
- 1 October 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Vol. 123 (4), 763-787
- https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000382
Abstract
A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person's multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds-identity-specific schemas for categorizing others-and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets' racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets' other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses.Keywords
This publication has 70 references indexed in Scilit:
- At the Crossroads of Conspicuous and Concealable: What Race Categories Communicate about Sexual OrientationPLOS ONE, 2011
- Illusory Conjunctions of Angry Facial Expressions Follow Intergroup BiasesPsychological Science, 2010
- Diversity Science: Why and How Difference Makes a DifferencePsychological Inquiry, 2010
- FACES—A database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: Development and validationBehavior Research Methods, 2010
- National differences in gender–science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievementProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Diversity in the person, diversity in the group: Challenges of identity complexity for social perception and social interactionEuropean Journal of Social Psychology, 2009
- Intersectionality and research in psychology.American Psychologist, 2009
- An R2 statistic for fixed effects in the linear mixed modelStatistics in Medicine, 2008
- Stereotype performance boosts: The impact of self-relevance and the manner of stereotype activation.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002
- Perceiving people as group members: The role of fit in the salience of social categorizationsBritish Journal of Social Psychology, 1991