Article summary with Category cues, positive stereotypes and reviewer recall by Pittinsky a.o. - 2000

People reduce the complexity of the world by using (group) categorization. This will facilitate the information processing, but this may also result in stereotyping. Stereotypes may have a huge impact when the perceiver doesn’t know the target personally. People have different features and belong to different social categories. A lot of research is dedicated to stereotyping, but not a lot of research focuses on multiple social categories. Researchers want to know why sometimes one category influences perceivers’ views about another person and why sometimes another category influences their views. They also wonder how this may affect the information that is being recalled.

This study wants to research whether subtle cues of a target’s different social categories (gender and ethnics) will make salient different stereotypes about a person and whether this influences reviewer recall during an interview. In this study, participants needed to review the college application materials of an Asian American female. Some participants had her gender category (female) cued, some had her ethnic category (Asian) cued and others had neither category cued. One stereotype about Asian Americans is that they have superior quantitative skills compare to other ethnic groups. A common stereotype about women is that they have inferior quantitative skills compared to men. The researchers hypothesize that participants would recall lower math SAT scores for the applicant if the gender was cued, compared to participants who had the ethic category or neither category cued. They also think that the opposite is true: participants will recall higher math SAT scores for the applicant if the ethnicity was cued.

The researchers got to read some information about the applicant, like the SAT scores and other presentations and afterwards would be put in the experimental condition. During the debriefing all participants said that they really believed they were reviewing an applicant. The results supported the hypothesis: people recalled a lower math SAT score in the gender-cue situation than in the other situations and they recalled a higher math SAT score in the ethnicity-cue situation than in the other situations. One important thing to note is that in every situation, participants recalled lower math SAT scores than had been presented. This is maybe because gender is a more chronically accessible category than ethnicity. If this study would have been done with a male applicant, the recalled scores of the math SAT test would maybe not be much lower than presented.